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Soft Skills for Engineers (Part 1)

Several years ago, when I would be in performance review and promotion decision meetings at Facebook, we would spend most chunks of that of time discussing the most difficult cases. These were engineers who had tremendous technical ability, who single-handedly built and deployed software that had impact to the greater company, but who failed to communicate and coordinate what they were doing, who were bad at bringing junior engineers into an effort, or who had long-running feuds with other people in the organization and refused to work with them. No matter how strong their strengths and how brilliant their brilliance, these glaring weaknesses undermined everything they’d done. These engineers, for all their amazing technical abilities and depth of knowledge — their “hard skills” — missed out on being promoted and sometimes had to leave the company due to their lack of “soft skills.”

What are soft skills? A definition I found identically on multiple web pages (without attribution) is “Soft skills are those skills that come naturally [emphasis added] and uniquely to everyone. These include leadership, effective communication, teamwork, time management, motivation and adaptability.” But these often do not come “naturally” to extremely technical people, due to such people’s extreme focus on facts and figures, introversion, or not being neurotypical. When I was young, if I had been able to connect easily with others, make small talk, and be part of the “in crowd,” it would have been much easier for me, but I might not have ever pursued my inclinations toward technology and become as successful there.

But soft skills can be studied and cultivated, if you care about improving and doing some digging around in your own understandings of yourself. It won’t be that easy if all you’ve done is technology, but small improvements in the ability to communicate and connect with people can make a big difference to the direction of your life, both in work and personal matters. Even if you’re Level 80 in Engineering, levelling up from 1 to 2 in soft skills starts to open new doors.

Bruce Lee is often quoted as saying, “Focus on your strengths and they will overcome your weaknesses.” Engineers seem to naturally follow that plan, to achieve their level of mastery through single-minded attention to technology, and choosing to ignore things like social interaction, human relationships, and common social niceties. That approach can take you quite far as a technologist, and if you’re essential to the company, people will put up with your rough edges, in the same way they’d put up with the rock star who trashes the hotel room. That kind of behavior can even add to the mystique around you. But at some point, you might find that your career growth has slowed or is taking you in a direction that you don’t want. You may also be lonely and feel unappreciated. Your tech strengths are probably amazing enough, and working on your soft-skill weaknesses can get you back on track and give you a jump-start.

When I was young, before things like autism spectrum disorder were commonly discussed, I’m confident that, based on my tendency then to avoid eye contact, withdraw inward, and obsess about subjects like space travel and computers, I would have been diagnosed with some version of it. In middle and the early years of high school, faced with students who bullied or made fun of me, I decided that anyone who cared only about things like appearance and being likeable was superficial, and I didn’t care to try to do anything to be their friend either. I was waiting for someone to discover my hidden depths, someone who really cared that I knew a lot of facts and understood things like computers and Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem, someone who was willing to ignore that I could also be annoying and arrogant. I had a near total lack of soft skills, except perhaps around curiosity and motivation.

But somehow, I developed cracks in that façade, and started to find ways to connect with others. I’m an introvert; but, like most introverts, I still wanted friends — I was lonely and didn’t like being lonely. I began by putting myself into situations where no one knew me, where no one would know I was an outcast, and I could try to change the ways I reached out to people and connected with them. In the last year or two of high school, I often took part in state-level activities where there were few if any people from my own school, so I got the chance to act more socially confident and out-going than I really felt inside and, even if this started this in “emulation mode,” over time it started to feel more natural.

The most powerful help was learning to develop caring relationships with people who were comfortable in telling me honestly when I was reading a situation inappropriately or, to my occasional surprise, when I was on the right track. When I was just starting to learn about social niceties, the biggest gift of all was that a couple of my romantic crushes ended up becoming close friends who would, to my disconcert and amazement, spend as much time as I needed explaining to me how I’d misunderstood or miscommunicated. These weren’t easy conversations to have, but starting to learn and grow was way better than continuing to make the same awkward mistakes over and over again.

When someone criticizes you, it means they care enough about you to let you know what you’ve done wrong, and believe in you enough that they think you can improve. If the closest people to you stop criticizing you, it means that you’ve either become perfect (less likely), or that they have given up on you (much more likely). Remember that “feedback is a gift”. If you find someone who will consistently and honestly describe ways you can improve, they are worth their weight in vibranium.

At this point, I was still awkward, but not at the level where the slightest setback sent me back inside my defensive shell. And these small steps to build these human connections slowly snowballed over my life until my soft skills have become a source of strength. I value these skills so much because I had to consciously choose to build them at every step of the way. I’m still working on them every single day, as a technologist, as a workplace leader, as a parent, and as a life partner to my spouse.

You build soft skills through doing the work and having experiences. Reading about them (like you’re doing now) is good, but only as an inspiration to do the hard practical work. There’s a big difference between reading about someone running a marathon, and just doing it — getting up early and running the distances, training for months, and then pushing yourself past every limit until all that’s left is a struggling will to finish, aching and gasping for breath. But once you’ve done something, you know that you have the tools to break through that kind of obstacles, and that they won’t break you.

All these soft skills are like that. If you build that inner strength of knowing you can do something — connect with someone at work, start a new project, give a tech talk, find a way to move your project forward — then you’re going to attempt to do it. Whether you succeed or fail, you’re going to level up on your ability to dare to do something new.

In a recent weekend, while on a family outing in Brick Lane in London, I found a young man in a booth selling some beautiful and captivating illustrations, as Artistically Autistic. While I was looking at them, he approached me, explained the stories and deeper allegoric meanings behind each drawing, and engaged with me as a salesman. After we bought two of them, I told him how I was impressed that he did a very good job connecting with me and making the sale. He pointed to his headphones and said that those are his way to protect himself if he gets over-stimulated, and that he can only manage this one day of the week. The rest of the week, he stays inside and inward.

My wife, who is quite socially adept, had spent ten minutes talking with him without realizing that he was autistic. He found a path that works for him to be outwardly facing and successful at a soft skill — selling and connecting with people. This is the kind of journey I’m planning to explore in this series.

Here are some examples of the kinds of soft skills we’ll be exploring in upcoming posts:

• Communication — How do you listen better to those around you, and make sure they understand what you have to say.
• Time Management — Saying Yes to things you want to do and that you have bandwidth to commit to, and No to things that are less important.
• Humility and Sincerity — Not putting yourself down, but realizing that everyone around you has something you can learn from.
• Emotional Intelligence — Understanding your own and others’ emotions
• Collaboration & Teamwork — Working well with others, both as a leader and as a collaborator or follower.
• Adaptability & Growth Mindset — Being comfortable starting completely fresh in something, and learning from your mistakes as you go.
• Creativity — How to get better at out-of-the-box ideas, connecting things and making insights.

Continue here for Part 2.

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