>Yup. People skills matter. Programming seems like a great job for asocial people. It's actually the shittiest job imaginable if you have weak people skills, because you get staffed with the crappy maintenance projects that have no upside. (Programming probably has the most variance of any job category; the best projects are a lot of fun, and the worst grind your mind to sawdust and produce nothing.) If no one likes you, no one trusts you, and you'll never get projects where your technical intelligence really matters.
I understand the hate that technical people have for "office politics" but the only approach that works is to adapt. To figure that shit out so you can laugh (silently) at the suckers who don't get it instead of being one of them.
This is why the best programmers are in startups -- I do not believe you can be good at people and computers at the same time. And it is much more profitable to be involved in people, sadly.
> This is why the best programmers are in startups -- I do not believe you can be good at people and computers at the same time. And it is much more profitable to be involved in people, sadly.
Could this also be one of the _biggest_ reasons why startup fails? Lack of people skill and focusing on technical problems for the sake of technical? Not to mention lack of communication to know the intend of the code seems to be the biggest time sink on programmer's productivity.
Of course on the flip side you can always hire the smarter and smarter developers than the previous guy since you kind of need them to navigate the previous legacy code base. This seems to be the pattern in our industry.
I do not believe you can be good at people and computers at the same time.
You can become adequate, and you should. Yes, the monkey-bots running million-year-old legacy code are a pain in the ass (it's annoying being one, too) but you can learn how to deal with them, and you must.
People skills matter more when you're in startups. The business side is all pitch, pitch, pitch, and from a disadvantaged position. If you're technical, you need the people skills to size up a business co-founder, or else you'll end up with a dud, and you need to be good enough with people that he trusts you and takes you seriously.
This is why the best programmers are in startups -- I do not believe you can be good at people and computers at the same time. And it is much more profitable to be involved in people, sadly.