Ever Elusive People Skills

25 August 2026

If you are a software developer asking for a raise, and your manager tells you some version of: "Technical skills are great, but people skills matter as well", or "You are not assertive enough", you may safely assume they are trying to downplay your results. The statements you will more than likely hear after that will be self-aggrandizement of how they got to where they are because of their supreme understanding of people.

At that point, you know they are playing into the stereotype that programmers are code-obsessed, poor communicators. That immediately tells you that the manager is not capable of assessing your work and is moving the discussion into a vague area where they can provide an explanation that conveniently hides their own inability to estimate engineering impact. The "inadequate assertiveness" remarks can almost always be interpreted as: "I, your manager, am not qualified enough to understand what developers do, so I can only assess how good someone is by how much noise they are making."

Remember, you are not a tour guide, a car salesman, or a teacher. You develop software and that is a technical job first and foremost. Software companies became obsessed with soft skills after the 2019–2022 hiring spree bloated their ranks with non-technical staff. And managers, please, do not call yourselves "technical" if you can only use LLMs to generate code that you do not understand or if you cannot implement a C++ smart pointer while managing a C++ development team.

Regarding interactions with other people, here is the main thing to keep in mind: avoid being an ass. This comes from your upbringing, so your mom and dad should have taught you that. If they haven't, read The Ten Commandments of Egoless Programming and obey them.

Finally, I encourage you to ask yourself a hard question: "Do I really want to spend a third of my life catering to people who constantly set vague goals just so that they can keep moving the goalposts?"