Soft vs hard skills in IT
Hey everyone! I'm a beginner software engineer from Ukraine and I had a few hot discussions with my colleagues on this topic: ‘what is more important for a developer soft or hard skills. Why?’ If you have any thoughts, experience then you are welcome to answer. Thank you in advance!
One thing to add here, soft skills are transferable to pretty much any work and even more so, life in general.
It's a futile debate! Without hard skills (tech) you are not a software developer. Once you acquire bare minimum tech skills, you must strive to improve both at the same time. Tech skills are your lever and soft skills are fulcrum, upon which you must place your lever. Better you get at using both together, bigger impact you can make. Best luck!
I'd answer it in a table format
Technical skill/softskill (out of 100 each individually)
100/0 - no one wants to work with you, hard to get a job even impossible
80/10 - nice technical person that can get to senior level but not above
80/30 - can get team/tech lead
60/30 - team lead
0/60 - manager positions
That's a rough thinking on at least how it would turn out as an E. In bigger companies
When you start focus on hard skills - build, design, and scale. Sometime in your career, you will have to jump from deterministic software area into business. That is when structured thinking and communication comes into picture. I wrote about this here more: https://jjude.com/learn-next. Let me know if you have any questions on that. Would be happy to answer.