Tag: Engineering

Nice Work If You Can Git It

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Xanadu at New Conservatory Theatre Center- 2012

Once upon a time, about 3 years ago, I was a musical theatre actress. Yes, believe it or not, I haven’t always been a Developer Evangelist. While social media may make you believe that I’ve always spent my days coding, giving talks around the world, creating content, and organizing meet-ups… the truth is, if you met me 3 years ago, I spent most of my days auditioning, doing song & dance numbers on stage, taking lots of production photos, and organizing my 13+ hour days of a day job & rehearsal so I didn’t die of exhaustion. 💀

The world of theatre and the world of tech are vastly different. For one, you actually get paid a competitive wage for the amount of work you put into your technical roles (okay, open source is another story, but you know what I mean). Also, there are far more women in the theatre world (especially musical theatre world) than men… a stark contrast to what we see in most engineering organizations/tech companies in general. Also, people tend to dance and break into song much less frequently, but I digress…

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Hard and Soft Skills in Tech

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It’s both more serious and less serious than we’ve admitted

I’ve recently seen a lot of very anxious responses from people in tech at anything which suggests that their “core skills” may be devalued, especially in favor of other skills which they haven’t spent their lives on. Most importantly, this shows up in the argument over “hard” versus “soft” skills. That anxiety is itself a signal of how important this has become. But there’s a hidden assumption we’ve been making that (I suspect) has increased the anxiety far out of proportion: and maybe perversely, it comes from not taking soft skills seriously enough. Today, I’d like to share some thoughts on what’s actually happening, and a set of things we can do to help fix it for all of us.


The hard and the soft. Left: “Hammer” by 0Four; Right: “Cloth in the Khiva Market” by eatswords.

1. Some observational data

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