You don't necessarily need amazing soft skills
There is a large amount of content on social networks that claims that you should develop soft skills to grow and become a senior engineer. While better soft skills are nice to have, it doesn’t mean you necessarily need them now or need them to be that good.
One large cultural difference I learn between Google and Meta is that
- At Google, every staff engineer is essentially a tech lead (TL) – someone who has both technical and soft skills to lead people on a large project
- At Meta, you can grow to staff and beyond without being a TL, you can grow as a hacker/code machine where your technical skills are significantly better than your soft skills.
Meta has different growth paths because the separation between manager and IC is clear – there’s no TLM role (IC role with reports). From there, Meta pairs managers with ICs allowing each of them to play on their strengths. So rather than trying to force people to learn skills they aren’t good at, they form teams where people build on each other’s strengths.
So whether you have to focus on soft skills depends on what companies you are at and how teams are structured. With that being said, I think building strong technical skills is a better strategy than building mediocre soft skills since:
- It’s easier for company to hire senior managers than to hire senior ICs – that’s what I learned from the last time I was on the job market
- Good companies seek what’s best, not the idea with the best looking slides.
- Being able to talk well about technical trade off requires a deep understanding of technical concepts – so soft skills are limited by how good one’s technical skills are
The only caveat is that you need reasonable soft skills when looking for a new job and/or make sure you have solid references and/or make sure you are joining a company that knows how to play on your strengths.
Thoughts? How far do you think you can make it with just soft skills?