So, as I explained in my earlier post, I took the exam this morning to certify for TS for MOSS (SharePoint) configuration. Aside from the test dragging a whole bunch of skeletons out of my closet, it also left me feeling just a bit spunky. So, I guess I can't resist the urge to stick my middle finger up at somebody right now. Here’s something that came pouring out after I got all the self-immolation out of the way.

--fold--

If you have skills - if you are truly brilliant - people will find a way to try and put you in your place. There is some truth to the expression that “the nail that sticks up gets hammered down”. A lifetime of punishment for doing well has changed my behavior over time; it has made me learn not to shine too brightly. The Dao says that you should never forget the value of worthlessness - the gnarly tree by the side of the road does not get cut down for firewood. There’s some truth to that as well.

When you leave college, or after high school if you don’t go to college, hopefully you will be lucky enough to get a job doing what you like. After all, you're going to do it for half your waking life, so you'd better like it. But, something I remember from school is that there’s no short supply of people in the world for whom what they truly enjoy is putting other people down - or rather, establishing themselves in a group that is superior to others.

These people need to find jobs they like too, and while I don't think that every manager is one of these people, I’ve done some off the cuff counting of the ones I consider to be good managers vs. the ones that are not so good. I think it is fair to say that the career of management is at the very least an attractive option to these sorts of people. Once established on that track, they have learned to emphasize the areas of their personality in which they are strong and call them "soft skills", while they also downplay the role of "hard skills", perhaps sometimes almost without realizing that this is what they are doing.

What are hard skills, anyway? I suppose they’re the skills that actually let you get something measurable accomplished, whereas soft skills are soft because - like the soft sciences - they are as much or more fluff than quantitative or empirical and verifiable fact. If I were feeling more generous I might admit that at least the actual results of employing soft skills are more difficult (or impossible) to measure, but their use can produce real results.

So, what do I want to say by this? Am I saying these skills don't exist? Hardly! In fact, I myself have been in management positions at different levels, so I know that there are skills you can learn and that some people are indeed more socially adroit than others. But is there a certification exam for working with people? Is there a bar exam that you need to pass to prove that you are not someone who will poison the work environment at your company? No, not that I know of - the PMP certification teaches hard management skills, not social skills - just as an MBA teaches you tools and rules for running a business. But, an MBA can’t make you fun at parties all by itself – quite the opposite I would think!

To the best of my knowledge, there’s no finishing school for businesspeople. Maybe there should be. If there were, then many people who are too quick to point to a skilled developer and loudly comment about his "lack of soft skills" would have washed out long ago and become something a little easier to handle like being a hand sanitizer, salad bar spray barrier, or tire patch-n-repair kit.

After thinking about it for some time, I have come to believe that much of the discourse about soft skills that we take for granted as part of our working life is actually a myth. In fact, the truth is that we all have soft skills. We go home and have to practice conflict resolution with our families. We all develop different techniques for time management that work for us – however badly that may be. Many sports nuts would have a hard time fitting in at an anime convention - and being outnumbered might not feel too comfortable about it. I’ve seen very powerful people who were universally disliked by literally everyone at their company, but who didn’t even know it (though I believe they may have suspected it strongly). I’ve also seen executive managers in high levels jobs slink around as if they had been labeled “most likely to wear a pocket protector” because they were ostracized by their peers. Anyone kicked in the teeth long enough will begin to behave in ways that show they expect it, and the opposite it also true. Give a lowly developer a private office and they will start to behave more like they are 'in charge' as a result.

It is true that this is nothing more than my opinion, but I believe the myth of soft skills is a construction generated by the people who were the “cool kids” in high school, created for the purpose of indefinitely perpetuating their position in the social hierarchy. It has theory X written all over it. It has its roots in the same insidious class based elitism that causes us to say things like, "ain't isn't a word." even though you probably can't find a native English speaker alive who can't tell you what it means (and it's even in the dictionary!). There are real coping skills that people learn for dealing with each other, but to put up an imaginary straw man called "soft skills" and attach to it all your preconceived notions that nerds are socially inept is worse than wrong; it's pure and simple bigotry, and people who do it ought to be ashamed of themselves.

To be truly effective, any evaluation of soft skills would have to be based on measurable facts, and even psychologists and sociologists will tell you that generating this kind of verifiable and repeatable data [ethically] in human beings is challenging. Despite this, they do find interesting way to shed light on human behavior, and management science does sometimes find ways to translate this into the business world.

But, business itself could do much more. If we honestly expected the same quality of performance from people who had working with people as one of their primary job responsibilities, as we do from people who perform technically, then I don’t think it would be unreasonable to require from them the same kind of objective certification of their "soft skills" as is required for IT, medicine, law, accounting, or the building trades.

Perhaps such a test would be too costly in terms of time and "actors" to be feasible for new employee screening. Without being emotionally realistic, it would be incredibly easy to just fake it. But, at the very least I think we could all (technical and non-technical alike) benefit from some simulation exercises and training. Just as an example, I would like to see a salesperson or recruiter placed in the position of having to work overtime for several weeks straight, and then measure their social skills as their project is slated to be cancelled prematurely and they’re forced into the position of defending their investment in time. Or maybe they could be periodically graded on the way they deliver constructive criticism to employees who require negative feedback. I had some other ideas too, but they were starting to take on the characteristics of the Stanford and Milgrim experiments, so I’ll just stop. Again, ethics, challenging stuff.

Truly thinking about it now, I guess it's very complex and would require a lot of thought, but one thing I do know is that there aren't nearly enough people devoting resources into this area of testing or training as there should be. To say it is an order of magnitude less than the scrutiny given to IT skills would be a gross understatement, and it is only fair that somebody's feet should be held to the fire to make it happen.

Since that will probably never happen, maybe instead I’ll just write a science fiction novel about what it would be like if we did.