Different Types of IT Skills Evaluation

Recently, I often see a very nervous reaction of IT professionals at the slightest hint that their “basic skills” are being depreciated, and first of all in favor of other skills that they have not honed all their lives. This is most evident in discussions where so-called hard skills are contrasted with soft ones. This attitude in itself shows how important this problem is. But at the bottom of it lies an assumption that I feel disproportionately fuels anxiety: as absurd as it sounds, perhaps this outcry is due to the fact that we don't take soft skills seriously enough. Today I would like to share my view on the situation and suggest a number of steps that could help all of us.

Few observations

One of the surest ways to get people hyped online is to assume that soft skills will eventually come to the fore in IT, overshadowing the hard ones. When I say “turn up”, I mean not just disagreement, but disagreement with a strong intensity of emotions. This intensity is a very important indicator.

There is one very reliable pattern that I have been able to trace in many situations: the strength of a person's emotional reaction to any statement can say a lot about how closely this statement is related to topics that are sore for him. In words, this all seems to be transparent, but as a detection method it works extremely efficiently. Acute reactions lead us to real problems and real threats. (I shamelessly stole this trick from psychologists, and more specifically from psychotherapists: they use it to find out what problems are fundamental to the patient. The general rule is that the more difficult it is to talk about something, the more important it is likely to be.

In our case, it is interesting that for some reason people are so worried about the value of hard and soft skills relative to each other, and not, say, about economic instability in general or a glut of the market with specialists, although these two factors also carry a danger. for their status.

We can perceive the frequency of acute reactions as a kind of implicitly expressed "public opinion". From the point of view of culture, this is an important point - after all, culture is created by the same society. By identifying patterns in conversations and responses on this topic over the past few years, seeing how high the level of anxiety in discussions is, I come to the following conclusion: many people instinctively anticipate that soft skills will have a big rise, but are afraid of thinking what consequences it will have for them.

 

What lies behind this

If you look from the side, this sharp rise will not be surprising. The type of “lone genius with a difficult character” is becoming rarer and rarer for the reason that few technologies are now created by one person. In my last job, a significant part of my responsibilities involved bringing hundreds, if not thousands, of people into agreement and maintaining that consensus so that everyone is moving in the same direction. It was a very difficult task; like most IT professionals, I was completely unprepared for this, and I constantly felt that I was only pretending that I knew what I was doing, in the hope that no one would see me through.

When you work in a large team, resolving communication and collaboration challenges quickly becomes the determining factor for success or failure. Things like "psychological safety" and "mutual trust" affect the daily workflow much more than any specific programming tasks. For juniors, they are important because they determine their quality of life: trying to perform technical tasks among people who can not stand you is both difficult and painful. When you move to a higher level, it gradually becomes your responsibility to create and maintain an atmosphere in the team. The deep difference between the positions of junior and senior is also this: the task of the junior is to look for answers to questions, the task of the senior is to figure out what questions to ask. Of course, there are always the most puzzling problems that are of critical importance and which inexperienced employees will not cope with, no matter how much you throw them at the task - unless they are pumped sharply. Accordingly, we also need to continue to develop and expand our skills. But as you develop as a specialist, you will soon find that all these incredibly difficult technical tasks do not take up all of your working time. On the contrary, the most fundamental (and most difficult) problems for a system to work concern, rather, how it interacts with the outside world - that is, with people. Interestingly, hard and soft skills overlap much more than most people think. When you start to see your system as part of a larger system in which people function as elements, when you start to wonder how people interact with each other and behave, many of the good old systems developed through hard skills not only become clearer, but also give more accurate answers to questions that are usually classified as soft. Two classic examples are the rules of operation for sites with multiple users and the ranking of all possible results. In both cases, the whole point is to translate the "soft" intuitive understanding of what people want into "hard" mathematical expressions.