Teaching someone who is bad at coding means fixing 2-5 years of mistakes. Teaching someone who is poor at communication means fixing 20+ years of mistakes.
Plus, it's easier to convey coding mistakes than social mistakes since it's more difficult to communicate the large amounts of unwritten social rules.
> Rodrigo is an MIT graduate who writes compilers in his spare time. He is a core contributor to Haskell and wrote a few very well known Python packages. He can generally write very solid code that's readable and handles edge cases beautifully. However, he takes days to answer emails, he rarely picks up his phone, he doesn't seem to have much of an understanding of the importance of deadlines, he does things his own way, and you can't get a clear thought out of him without rambling incoherence surrounding it.
If you take 20 programming novices, maybe one will be as good as Rodrigo at coding after 5 years of intensive practice.
Maybe, but there's a difference between the real Rodrigos, and the programmers that just think they are in that class, but only match up on the negatives (unresponsive, don't show up to work, think they are above the rest of the group).
I'll take a team player who has room for improvement almost every time over some rockstar who can't take constructive criticism.
Not that we only have these two choices, but the truly great AND nice are kind of rare compared to the wanna-bes who think being an amateur professor at work translates into business value.
It's very easy to give someone a list of concrete things they need to do about communication: 1) respond to emails within one business day, 2) update your manager and coworker 4 days before a deadline if it looks like you'll miss it, etc.
On the other hand, it's very hard to give someone a list of concrete things that will make them a better programmer. I suspect if you tried, you'd end up with very subjective things like 'strive for readable code' etc.
Yes, it's easy to give someone a list to do, but if you want him to do exactly what you want him to do, there's one certain condition: the man must be good at communication.
I got some colleagues who are like the guy in this post, it's very hard to let them see the importance of communication, they are very stubborn. Mostly, they see what they are doing matters.
I'm not saying teaching someone coding is easy, but at least you can see some progress on this, which make both side much easier.
To be honest, I went back and forth several times on which one I thought would be easier. It's extremely dependent on the skills and personality of the person in question.
I ended up deciding the people skills would be easier to teach because, frankly, the culture of the field demands a lot more in terms of technical skills than it does in people skills. The bar is set a lot lower for people skills among developers than it is for programming skills, and in my opinion, pulling someone from "horrible" to "competent" communication is easier than pulling someone from "ok" to "awesome" as a developer. But the truly skilled, in either area, are hard to find and worth their weight in gold.
I feel like I've met a similar number of good communicators and good programmers--despite an enormous bias toward meeting good programmers. Besides, good communication is a core human competency; so I suspect that the number of great communicators vastly outnumber the number of great programmers.
To me, this implies that programming is harder to teach and learn; though you could also take it to mean that Rodrigo is that much more obtuse regarding communication.
I think the problem may actually socializing and not really communication. I noticed that people often confuse/combine the two. I haven't met any programmer that can't communicate, but I have met many that aren't very social.
Plus, from the description I read, Gabriella shows an interest in becoming a better programmer: she is constantly looking for feedback to improve her work. We get no such indications about Rodrigo.
This, I think, puts Gabriella slightly over the bar -- she sees value in being more like Rodrigo, but it doesn't appear that Rodrigo sees value in Gabriella.
Teaching someone who is bad at coding means fixing 2-5 years of mistakes. Teaching someone who is poor at communication means fixing 20+ years of mistakes.
Plus, it's easier to convey coding mistakes than social mistakes since it's more difficult to communicate the large amounts of unwritten social rules.