As a self-taught programmer, my focus for many years was learning hard skills. I recently decided to switch gears to pay more attention to soft skills.
The simple answer is ’to be effective’.
As you grow in seniority, you deal with more complexity. This can be technical, organizational, or both. Even if it’s technical, a complex project with multiple stakeholders likely involves putting together a design doc, coordinating with other teams, and getting customer feedback to know you’re on the right track.
In a nutshell, success often requires going beyond writing code.
My sense is less that it’s hard to learn soft skills, but it’s hard to give importance to soft skills when you’re used to being able to tell what the right answer is. It’s like wanting to solve more simultaneous equations when you can check against the answer in the back, rather than doing a closed reading of a poem.
The fact is, as per Matt Klein, both are hard.
One last thing: don't let anyone tell you that the tech/engineering is the easy part. It's not. It's hard. Soft skills are also hard. It's ALL hard, and both are required to succeed.
I’ve spent a long time learning how things work under the hood; now simply changing the subject of interest from computers to humans.
The other thing that makes it hard is it’s often less clear if the lesson translates well to your situation. It’s a bit like reading case studies on leadership at business school. If you’re at a Series A startup, is it that helpful to read Jack Welch? Probably not. On the flip side, it’s a missed opportunity to not spend any time on it at all.
My learning has been rather circuitous. It started with being deliberate in recognizing the need to develop soft skills, rather than picking up another programming language. Like learning via case studies, I hope to illuminate these with quotes from podcasts.