[oreally]

Overall, it'll be a worse world if you can't make a living purely on hard skills.

If soft skills is mostly about sucking up, and there is no demand for any hard skill, you'll find society less able to stand up to the pressures of a majority group, because guess what, they're all too scared to stand up as an individual for fear of dropping the ball on the soft skill.

Moreover, the game theory of the soft skill is treacherous and uncertain. There's too many unknown unknowns, it's like not knowing if the dice you're playing is loaded against you. You don't know how many cultural land mines you might step on when interacting with your superior, or if there's a glass ceiling enforced by a group who will nitpick on minor irrelevant 'faults'.

Whereas compare soft skills to hard skills, you have a major advantage in certainty. There is a dice loaded in your favor. You know you can get much of the stuff done, and once you've reached the desired results, that's all there is to it.

I also could go on on how soft skills erodes human's capacity for judging what is value, instead basing their opinions on the majority source of opinions... It'll definitely be a much more irrational world to live in.

[pdpi]

I'm sorry, but that's nonsense. Soft skills are mostly definitely not about sucking up.

At a previous job, the PM for another team often asked me to join some of their meetings — her engineers were shit at talking to non-technical people, so, for critical meetings, she asked me to join to serve as an interpreter of sorts. That's soft skills at work.

Talking to stakeholders and understanding what they need? Soft skills. Understanding the different between important and urgent? Soft skills. Being able to assess a candidate during an interview? Soft skills. Navigating cultural differences when you have offices or suppliers abroad? Soft skills.

I'd go as far as to say that the single biggest difference between a junior and a senior engineer is how well developed their soft skills are.

[oreally]

Perhaps it's a poor choice of words, what I mean by 'sucking up' refers to understanding the counterparty's mind (and making decisions to close the deal), and it is definitely a part of the game.

Every single thing that you listed requires a understanding of the opposing party that you just talked about in order to make the deal work out. A boss has his/her temper to deal with, her engineers have their own preferences, and that sucks, because as I said the game of soft skills can be a cultural landmine equivalent to rolling a dice with unknown odds.

If that is the only game in town, the result could turn out to be like the USA's politics of today, with no way to deviate/defect if you disagree.

[qualifck]

But most of the things you're describing as bad can also be described as a lack of soft skills. The person who can't take care of themselves and rolls over under pressure definitely has poor soft skills.

[avadodin]

The System rewards yes-men and bullshit-artists and LLMs have come to replace them.

> ifonlyyouknew.jpg