The problem with hard and soft skills
dompatmore.com
dompatmore.com
The "hard technical skills" award goes to a fairly-introverted IC, who is quite productive on difficult stuff (given good leadership), but not so great with people. At least recognize the guy's contributions. Yes, that's a male.
The "soft technical skills" award goes to a low-to-mid-level manager who clearly understands both the technology (though maybe not all the low-level details) and the human IC's and lower-level managers who make it happen. (And "uses those powers for good", if it needs be mentioned.) I'd be a bit biased toward a female, if only to send a "people skills good, machismo bad" message to certain less-skilled managers.
What you are talking about are people who mix hard technical skills with social skills, that is also valuable but it is a different thing. Soft skills as a concept was invented to show that even skills you couldn't put in a checkbox could also be valuable, and is mostly for HR because for them it is easy to just rank candidates by which boxes they check.
I would guess, with deliberate practice and hard work, many people are able to hit the 80th percentile of skill at something. Going beyond that likely takes some natural talent or luck.
The thing is, that getting to the 80th percentile in multiple areas makes you more valuable, than if you just spent the time getting to 95th percentile in a single area.
So if you 80th percentile programmer, maybe you shift and study writing and communication and you become an 80th percentile writer. Now as an individual contributor you are 96th percentile (1 - (.2*.2)). You study some management and work on becoming an 80th percentile manager, and now you are a 99th percentile employee (1 - (.2 * .2 *.2)).
Programming skills are for the most part table stakes. Once you reach a certain level of proficiency, work on communication and leadership.
[1] https://michelleockers.com/2019/12/02/skill-stacking-with-sc...
[2] https://forge.medium.com/how-to-become-the-best-in-the-world...
"Value"? Aren't managers compensated better than individual contributors?
And the larger the percentage of the population can learn the task/skill/subject the softer it is.
With this definition we can still use the words hard and soft and I don’t think it changes too much how we use them now.
And then any social consequences that come from the use of the words would just be inherent based on a reasonable definition.
"If you can't measure it, it doesn't matter" is I think fairly well known to be false.
I also think, as you describe, that it's very valuable when technical folks have at least some baseline of communication skills (not specifying whether that is hard/soft, especially considering that they may need to communicate about very complex topics). I'm not optimistic about anyone being the best at both, but it's not impossible.
People will say psychology is a "soft science" because "it's based on statistics and general probabilities, not hard rules and guarantees". But quantum mechanics is founded on the idea that nothing in it can be guaranteed and it's all just statistics and probability -- yet we consider QM a "hard science".
TL;DR: Can we stop qualifying knowledge and skills based on arbitrary rules about what make them "true Scots-knowledge"?
Soft sciences measure complex things, like human behavior, that are challenging to define in a rigorous fashion. People are more comfortable with simple things, like atoms and subatomic particles and rigid objects, which behave as a simple unit following simple laws. That makes biology a "softer" science -- not because it's easier, but because it's more difficult.
Hard skills are easy to measure: can you write the code that does the thing, quickly? But soft skills like "can you figure out what needs to be done?" and "can you communicate with clients and coworkers?" and "can you write clear instructions?" are hard to measure.
We have a notion that only things that can be measured are real. But that skips over the fact that some things are important, but difficult or impossible to measure. It's poor reasoning to assume that only things that have already been given rigorous definitions are relevant, but it's popular among people who don't wish to practice soft skills.
It would be great if we could appreciate that science, and software, are human activities done by humans for humans, requiring a mix of skills both easy and hard to measure.
It's soft science because it's squishy. The rules are soft and malleable, depending on the context of the question.
Quantum mechanics describes the probabilities exactly, it includes every single way the particle can behave. There is no statistics here, it just gives an exact probability distribution. This is not like psychology at all where we don't have any exact descriptions of how humans can behave in different situations.
Or in another way, the results of physics are "hard" (unyielding) since we have yet found any experiment where the particles don't behave according to the distributions we get from quantum physics. Those distributions are therefore as exact as anything humans can know can be exact.
Psychological experiments aren't that exact, the psychological experiments run produces different distributions all the time since they don't have hard requirements on the input, humans aren't exact, humans are very fuzzy data wise so until we can specify a human precisely psychology will remain a soft science.
And no, we can't stop seeming to clam no true Scotsman. That's because there are things masquerading as legitimate. And we're on HN. So any time someone points out the divide, those accusations are inevitable.
It isn't though. It's not like math, built on axiomatic foundations. Psychology predates the discovery of neurons.
(Math isn't really like that either.)
I've never heard of a "soft technical skill"
Who would get the hard skill award?
Who would get the soft skill award?
Why aren't they same person?
> Why aren't the genders the same?
They are. Not getting the point of this lead in.
Have you never heard of “soft skills” OR the genders are the same, which is it? If you don’t know what a soft skill is, how are concluding that they’re both the same gender? You literally said you don’t understand the question.
Another comment suggested that "create a good architecture for a complex software project" can be a soft tech skill. I don't see how this is gender-biased other than the number of males in the profession largely outnumbers women so the answer to both is more likely male.
Soft skills are skills that are hard to measure. This includes social skills, but also other things like being able to create a good architecture for a complex software project etc.
There is nothing stating that soft skills needs to be social and hard skills needs to be technical, if you mean those then just say social or technical instead of soft or hard.
It is also a redundant definition, if you say that soft == social and hard == technical, then why not just say social and technical skills? However any experienced programmer knows that there is much more to programming than just knowing a language and frameworks, so to us it makes perfect sense to talk about soft technical skills even though a manager might think that we only have hard skills that can be jotted down as a list of checkboxes. So I think that breaking this misconception is very important, there are plenty of soft technical skills to care about when evaluating a hire!