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Comment by rowanG077 | Hacker News Reader

My experience is that raw coding ability is basically unteachable. At least by the time someone looks to be hired. The more "soft" stuff is easy to teach. Once an engineer burns their fingers on it he will learn it. So I would definitely look for raw coding skill. The rest is relatively easy to pick up.

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My experience is the opposite - you can easily guide someone on a path to learning how to code, but the 'soft' skills you mention are often impossible to change in someone: like how they interact with peers, or how they approach challenges, or how they learn. These things are infinitely harder to evaluate during interviews but have far greater impact on your impact at work, as far as I can see.

You're mistaking average/good developers for great ones. There is definitely a gap between those and raw coding ability at that point is the one skill that you can't teach without fundamentally changing one's mental state. Soft skills definitely have that same issue, but to a significant lesser extent

The question then becomes, do you need great developers? And that depends on what you are doing.

A lot of the engineers I've worked with have often had extreme short-comings in their quality as an engineer because they have huge pride in their abilities to code. The result is re-writing stuff, building stuff that's neat rather than needed, failure to communicate and learn from others, failure to share knowledge and teach. And the worst of it, it's very difficult to persuade them that any of that is their job.

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