I think our industry underemphasises soft skills because it tends to be a bigger weakness than usual in the general populace of practitioners, and people tend to minimize & avoid what they are weak at. We treat it as such to counteract the discounting tendency.
It was even more of the case in the first 10-20 years this person has been working in programming. Nowadays I've noticed people are getting more socially savvy in software in general, as the prestige of the field develops and more people enter who do it more as a career vs. something of a pure passion.
20/30 years ago you weren't making big bucks and being a programmer (it wasn't called software engineer back then) was associated with basically being on the spectrum, not showering and being a nerd who was low on the socio-sexual status hierarchy. You became a programmer because you liked computers. If you wanted money & prestige you did medicine, law or wall st.
I'm not so sure that's changed much. Aside from your odd finance unicorn or BigCo (Uber/Twitter), every VC startup's Engg department has at least 50% of people being on the spectrum. Maybe they dress better now and wear a nicer haircut, but autism is alive and well in the tech world, and I personally hope it stays.
It was even more of the case in the first 10-20 years this person has been working in programming. Nowadays I've noticed people are getting more socially savvy in software in general, as the prestige of the field develops and more people enter who do it more as a career vs. something of a pure passion.
20/30 years ago you weren't making big bucks and being a programmer (it wasn't called software engineer back then) was associated with basically being on the spectrum, not showering and being a nerd who was low on the socio-sexual status hierarchy. You became a programmer because you liked computers. If you wanted money & prestige you did medicine, law or wall st.