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Comment by karmakaze | Hacker News Reader

> Imagine you are giving awards for individuals that best demonstrate hard and soft technical skills.

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?

Because they're different skills and the odds that the same person is the best both is small.

> Why aren't the genders the same?

They are. Not getting the point of this lead in.

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Hard skills are skills that are easy to measure. For example, the score on a specific test, you can measure wither the person can do arithmetic's, algebra, spell words etc. This gives you hard evidence that the person possesses these skills.

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.

Thank you for putting software engineering into the soft skill bucket, but I think the word soft skill sort of means social/interpersonal skills. What you describe is more the difference between open and closed problems.

Defining soft skills so that they are only social skills is just the bias people have against technical skills. It comes from the biased view that all programmers do is equivalent to solving middle school math problems over and over, so there is no creativity in it.

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!

You can’t sit here and say that you know the answers to the questions, despite the fact that you can’t define what a hard or soft skill is. You gotta pick one stance here man.

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.

I know what a "soft skill" is, but the article said "hard and soft technical skills" and I don't know what a "soft technical skill" is which I think should have been defined so we all know what's being talked about rather than guessing which is what I did.

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.

I also had the same problem. It's a bad lead in.

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