GOTO - The Brightest Minds in Tech Professional Skills for Software Engineers • Charles Humble & Trisha Gee
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Aug 29, 2025 Trisha Gee chats with Charles Humble, a freelance techie and author of 'Professional Skills for Software Engineers.' They explore the importance of soft skills like communication and networking in tech careers, often overlooked in favor of technical abilities. Charles highlights how intentional communication can boost product development and career advancement. They also discuss the ethical implications of technology, inspiring personal stories for writing, and the positive impact of supportive team environments.
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Non-Technical Skills Drive Career Success
- Charles Humble argues career success often depends more on non-programming skills than raw coding ability.
- He organizes these into communication, critical thinking, documentation, and networking to teach learnable professional skills.
Stop Calling Them Soft Skills
- Avoid calling these skills "soft" because it devalues critical human and systems skills required to build the right thing.
- Reframe them as systems thinking or professional skills to reflect their real difficulty and importance.
Hiring Rewards The Noisy Over The Effective
- Hiring and promotion often overemphasize programming tests and ignore critical thinking or communication ability.
- That mismatch leads to promoting noisy "hero" programmers rather than people who sustainably improve teams.
