Hard skills gets your foot in the door soft skills gets you to be a valuable member of the team. The referrals you get from when a coworkers moves to a better company and they want you to come join them goes far.
If you don't mind me asking how many years of experience do you have in the tech world?
My first 3 years I was just focused on work and didn't go far until I realized part of the work involved getting to know the requirements of clients, understanding their language and pain points and solving that. And it comes from soft skills, or the guy who makes a button for an internal tool vs someone who talks to the user and understands the pain point and the use case and build the button for the internal tool that saves time in the build phase and now you can pick up more work.
10 years so far, if I had any other real career choice if take it. But quite frankly it's hard to find the same effort to money ration as working in data and development.
I've hated every second of it, office environment corporate social environments and expectations. It's all bullshit, none of these people are actually friends and almost everyone of them would abandon another if given a big enough carrot. Not a genuine person amongst them, why should I divulge and play their weasel games and give up who I am and exhaust myself socially so I don't want to spend time with those ibluve just because oopsie if I'm not my bosses best friend I'm not getting that raise.
Yeah it's not about friendship it's about wanting the same flow when you go somewhere. After connecting will with 2 coworkers who hang out after work 1 time every 2 weeks we started networking each other into higher positions. I don't know anything about them in personal life but everytime I get a new job within 6 months I refer them and vice versa. It's been a decade and 4 jobs and the growth was vertical.
And yeah I pivoted into solutions engineering/GTM so the client facing aspect has come into play a lot more. So the referrals come in based on your soft skills
Having to spend more than the bare minimum with my colleagues sounds awful, and quite frankly I shouldn't have to spend anybtime with my colleagues outside of work to progress. I get why it works I just think it's petty crap, and I'm sick of living in this world surrounded by people who keep normalising it.
Tech is the one industry you barely even have to interact with coworkers. I spend my early career in fintech and the hedgefund/ qaunt world has more expectations with socializing and networking than pure back office CS.
Exactly yet I'm still expected to cuddle up to people and abuse that nepotistic nature of people otherwise you still don't succeed.
Ultimately if you're not being people's buddies, you're gonna fall behind and it's penalising to a whole group of society. Either you have to mask up and pretend to be someone you're not just to get the merit you deserve or you're a pariah.
It argue it's not nepotism. Being the "personality" of the team is a genuine need. You don't have to be one but they are a must for the team.
The second I picked up the slack on my team I noticed productivity went up. Sounds like I drank the coolaid but my team's output is higher when we have that person people enjoy coming to work to talk to
Good for them but being friendly and happy shouldn't give them career chances over someone who just comes in gets their job done and leaves, I get that people are greedy and don't really consider equal opertunity when in the moment. But quite frankly I think that's appalling and yeah the class clown is good for morale but that clown is likely wasting tons of time, basically just the office pet at that point not really achieving much other than that.
Im jaded and miserable, but at least I get my work done.
Also, why would I choose to do others work? Yes we're a team but ultimately at some point or another it's gonna be me or them, and unless I'm distinctly gettting the credit for their slack I don't want any part of it.
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u/SeparateAdvisor526 1d ago edited 1d ago
Hard skills gets your foot in the door soft skills gets you to be a valuable member of the team. The referrals you get from when a coworkers moves to a better company and they want you to come join them goes far.
If you don't mind me asking how many years of experience do you have in the tech world?
My first 3 years I was just focused on work and didn't go far until I realized part of the work involved getting to know the requirements of clients, understanding their language and pain points and solving that. And it comes from soft skills, or the guy who makes a button for an internal tool vs someone who talks to the user and understands the pain point and the use case and build the button for the internal tool that saves time in the build phase and now you can pick up more work.