42 \ August 2019 \ http://www.phparch.comCommunity Corner
Why Soft Skills are Hard Skills
Gary Hockin
In tech, we have a term that I despise. “Soft Skills” refers to skills that aren’t specific to hardware or
software; they are skills that involve communication, social situations, and interacting with people.
People usually think of soft skills as supplementary to our primary job of writing code. I’ve read
and heard a lot of nonsense where they are secondary or complementary skills to the essential
knowledge of design patterns or proficiency in unit testing.Soft skills are just as valuable as our
technical skills. One of the reasons that
some of our peers don’t agree with this
is simple; the myth of the solitary devel-
oper persists in tech today.
Typically, we picture the soli-
tary developer sitting wearing their
noise-canceling headphones while
hacking out some code while in The
Zone™. Nobody dares disturb them
lest they wrench the developer, kicking
and screaming, out of that magical flow
allowing them to pound out code. Do
not disturb them while their blurred
fingers smash into a keyboard that
appears to be an extension of their
hands.
While I’m certainly not suggesting
that being in a coding flow is a bad thing,
pounding out code is, at most, half the
job of the rounded developer.
In this modern age of software
development, we don’t do anything in
isolation. The most effective teams are
agile (and some are also Agile) and
work together to produce the software
that the customer wants, whether that
customer is the end-user or a company
that’s hired us to create them some
software. It’s impossible to produce
applications that fully satisfy our
customer without frequent and open
communication within our engineering
teams and with those stakeholders.
It’s crucial for everyone on the team,
from the product owner to the business
analyst, to the developers and testers to
understand the way that the product
should function. Understandingfundamental things such as how the
application makes money, how it inter-
acts with other systems, and whom it is
targeting helps everyone to spot poten-
tial problems at the earliest stages.
Let’s say we’re writing software
targeting school-aged children and
their parents or caregivers. In our sprint
planning, we may talk about a ticket
that forces the user to respond to an
SMS message to register. While creating
the tickets for the registration feature,
one of the developers raises the point
that school-aged children may not have
access to a cell-phone; therefore, this
feature is flawed.
While this may be an obvious situa-
tion to many, it’s an example, after all,
the number of times I’ve seen flawed
features make it to the development
process only to be questioned by
well-informed developers is not trivial.
Having the empathy to wear your
customer’s shoes is such a valuable skill
that here at Twilio, we made it one of
our core tenets. Empathy is the develop-
er’s super-power. Like many soft skills, it
can be taught and practiced until it’s a
well-honed tool.
That’s another fallacy about people-
skills: that they are something you are
born with and which can’t be learned,trained, and practiced. We’ve all met the
downright rude person who gets away
with it because “it’s just their nature,” or
the person who disguises being horrible
with the phrase “I’m just telling it like
it is.” These people should learn to
communicate better to empower the
whole team because you can learn to be
a better communicator, and you should
do it to make your work as pleasant
and productive as possible. Remember,
being a “straight talker” is not an excuse
to be awful to people.
So please, level up your communica-
tion, writing, and people skills as much
as you do your technical, architectural,
and programming skills. Instead of
deciding to spend a few hours watching
talks on Kubernetes, why not consider a
few videos on empathy? There are also
great books on how to develop these
vital skills: I can highly recommend
Empathy: Why It Matters, and How
to Get It by Roman Krznaric, or for
learning how to think more about your
users, Badass: Making Users Awesome
by Kathy Sierra.
The ability to think like your users,
communicate well with your peers and
managers, and express yourself respect-
fully and clearly makes you a better
developer and a better person.Gary Hockin travels all over the world empowering develop-
ers as a Developer Evangelist for Twilio (fine purveyors of
communication APIs). He is a talented and evocative speaker,
a cultivated author of impressively entertaining blog posts, and
records elegant and informative screencasts and videos. Gary’s
also a contributor to the Zend Framework and is argumenta-
tive enough to be on the community review team. @geeh