> Unfortunately, almost all computer science education nowadays focuses on pure technical skills
I'm not sure I'd really call that unfortunate. CS education isn't about making you a more well-rounded person: It's about giving you a basic education in Computer Science.
Similarly I don't really lament that CS programs don't have a course in basic financial literacy, even though it would be incredibly useful.
These are really topics that should be addressed much, much earlier (empathy in particular is something we should start teaching children as young as possible) and should be mature ideas by the time people reach college-age.
> The impact is that many engineers plateau in their careers because they've underinvested in (and oftentimes looked down upon) the "soft skills" that actually separate the top engineers from everyone else.
To mirror the other comment, I hate to say it but if you're a software engineer at Google you're likely already a "top" engineer.
You're trying to explain what differentiates the top 0.1% from the top 1%, but I'm not sure it's a super useful distinction for the other 99%. For them, investment in hard skills might actually be considerably more fruitful (and land them that Google job in the first place).
Maybe not, I'll admit I could easily be wrong on that.
There's for sure a tricky balance on what fits into a CS education.
I remember when I was at MIT (oof, over a decade ago), many project-based CS courses where students were just put into teams and expected teamwork to just happen. Sometimes people got along, and the project would go fine. Other times, not so much.
I know I certainly wasn't very well-equipped to handle tension or to have hard conversations about fair distribution of work. And back them, I ended up just avoiding them. Knowing what I know now, even a single lecture on tools for more effective teams or for having hard conversations or giving feedback would have made those projects SO much more valuable in terms of being learning experiences.
Given that effectively using your CS education will involve collaborating with other people to some degree, I do believe that giving more emphasis to the non-technical skills that play a big role in your career would have a hugely positive impact.
> I know I certainly wasn't very well-equipped to handle tension or to have hard conversations about fair distribution of work.
I guess my point is more that primary school really should've prepared you for this: Group dynamics and how to handle these "group tensions" is more of a basic learning skill that we should be developing very early on.
I'm not arguing that this is a useless skill to teach, more that it's far more expensive and much less effective for MIT to be teaching you these skills and not MyTown elementary/middle/high school.
Why can't the managers with business backgrounds be the social engineers expertly manipulating the asocial software engineers? I thought that's what they were for. Distribution of labor!
I'm not sure I'd really call that unfortunate. CS education isn't about making you a more well-rounded person: It's about giving you a basic education in Computer Science.
Similarly I don't really lament that CS programs don't have a course in basic financial literacy, even though it would be incredibly useful.
These are really topics that should be addressed much, much earlier (empathy in particular is something we should start teaching children as young as possible) and should be mature ideas by the time people reach college-age.
> The impact is that many engineers plateau in their careers because they've underinvested in (and oftentimes looked down upon) the "soft skills" that actually separate the top engineers from everyone else.
To mirror the other comment, I hate to say it but if you're a software engineer at Google you're likely already a "top" engineer.
You're trying to explain what differentiates the top 0.1% from the top 1%, but I'm not sure it's a super useful distinction for the other 99%. For them, investment in hard skills might actually be considerably more fruitful (and land them that Google job in the first place).
Maybe not, I'll admit I could easily be wrong on that.