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Comment by angryGhost | Hacker News Reader

Technical skills are teachable to a coachable person, soft skills not so much

Soft skills are also teachable to a coachable person. I've seen it in action. However, far fewer people are receptive to coaching on soft skills because fewer people understand what "soft skills" are and why they matter.

I've met plenty of engineers (anecdotally, not a majority, but enough that it's a clear pattern, and strongly correlated with how junior they are) who lump soft skills into a single category represented by broad labels like "charisma" or "schmoozing" or "eloquence". But it's really a very big category of practicable skills.

I think "soft skills" disguises what these skills generally are and their importance in the context of an organization.

Things like navigating an org, knowing how to make asks that have a high % of being accepted, writing things for a specific audience and keeping conversations on track are all very important "soft skills" that are completely hidden by the "soft skills" label.

Right. The "soft skills" that make you popular and likeable with your peers are seriously disjoint from the "soft skills" that show you're in tune with management's (possibly unstated) priorities and know how to navigate them and know where the actual decision-making power centers are (and aren't). Sometimes, these skills are antagonistic to each other.

Trying to munge these all together under one label seems counterfactual. Certainly, they're very different sets of skills: the former are social, the latter overtly political.

Where can I learn more about these practical, important, or less thought about "soft skills" (like ZephyrBlu's interesting examples) more effectively? I feel like I've encountered these points (e.g. writing for a specific audience) through separate online posts at disparate times. But, is there a definitive, more comprehensive resource detailing all of these soft skills and more? I realize that I'm basically looking for a career panacea, so maybe it doesn't exist. Even if it existed, should I even spend my time reading it—as someone very early in their career—versus actually making the mistakes myself, learning from it, and internalizing it?

Through self improvement literature! The problem is there’s a lot of bad self improvement literature out there.

You are also right that a lot of it can only be approximately taught, because the process of internalizing the skills has a lot to do with figuring out how to work with your own personality.

Well, through the small fraction of self-improvement literature (or courses) that isn't garbage. But it will take lots of time and energy to discern which is which.

The more trustworthy and time-efficient way is from coworkers/ mentors/ friends.

Understanding why soft skills matter is teachable to a coachable person. But not without a coach and when it comes to soft skills there is a general reluctance towards providing soft skill coaching, with a prevailing attitude, as seen in the first comment, that anyone who "wasn't born" with soft skills is unteachable, leaving few willing to try to be the coach.

I'd go a step further and say that there will be times when you can sit across the table from a grown adult and explain to them the behind the scenes details of the performance review process, explain that you want them to do X Y and Z so you can build a case to get them promoted this year, just to have them tell you to fuck off because X isn't coding, Y is boring, and Z is below their skill level. "But please still promo me ASAP."

Technical skills are not really teachable much unless its a full time job.

Some people don't have the aptitude (for either.)

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