
Technical Skills Are Great, but Communication and Curiosity Are Better - kylegalbraith
https://blog.kylegalbraith.com/2019/04/11/technical-skills-are-great-but-communication-and-curiosity-are-better/
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j7ake
I think a good analogy is that a musician requires high technical skill, but
also needs to create art. Playing scales is not making art.

The best pianists all have great technical ability, but it's their ability to
communicate their musical feelings and explore the music that makes them
great. Being a pianist that can play all the scales perfectly is not well-
regarded a a musician.

Technical skills are still a requirement. Let's not kid ourselves.

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mpweiher
This is a popular meme, but I don't believe it is actually true.

Having technical skills is an absolute requirement. Not framework X or
language Y, those will change. But you need to actually be able to program a
computer.

There are many people who have wonderful curiosity and are great
communicators, but will not be able to actually program.

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commandlinefan
I am getting a little tired of the "programming is the least important part of
programming" platitude. Yes, yes, talk and learn and soft skills and people
skills and all that, but there's a reason why it's programmers who do the
programming.

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vokep
The thing is, if you have a bunch of "programmers" who barely have actual
programming skill, but a lot of curiosity and good attitude, they will get far
more done, and what they get done will be far more useful, than if you have a
bunch of programmers that are really good at coding but not much more.

At least, thats the theory.

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dominotw
Don't you have to have lots of curiosity to be 'really good at coding', esp
these days.

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xiaodai
Can I put a counter-point? For certain highly technical roles, being curious
about how to invert a b-tree is MUCH less important than actually being able
to invert a b-tree! So the title of the article should clarify to whether the
statement applies in all situations.

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dannykwells
I agree with this. At my organization our technical is not _that_ bad and is
pretty short. Our process to look for communication, curiosity, thought
maturity is much more intensive.

This process has meant that yes, we need to have technical mentoring in place,
but everyone is motivated and learns fast, and so technical barriers are
overcome quickly once identified.

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averros
Computers don't care about your communication skills. They don't tolerate
bullshit.

