AMAN SINGH
11 HN mentions · mentioned in 10 months, 2016–2026
1:18 · 1.4M views · Jul 26, 2013
A short clip from the film Office Space in which Tom Smykowski insists he has people skills. It is a well-known workplace comedy scene.
HN uses it as a recurring joke about people skills, managers and CEOs, and about the value of non-technical skills in tech.
11 comments from Hacker News
I don't want to lean into negativity here, and I'm far from an "AI Doomer". But... I will say I think the question you ask is a very fair question, and that there is, indeed, a LOT of uncertainty about what the future holds in this regard. So far the best reason we have for optimism is history: so far the old adage has held up that "technology does destroy some jobs, but on balance it creates more new ones than it destroys." And while that's small solace to the buggy-whip maker or steam-engine engineer, things tend to work out in the long-run. However... history is suggestive, but far from conclusive. There is the well known "problem of induction"[1] which points out that we can't make definite predictions about the future based on past experience. And when those expectations are violated, we get "black swan events"[2]. And while they be uncommon, they do happen. The other issue with this question is, we don't really know what the "rate of change" in terms of AI improvement is. And we definitely don't know the 2nd derivative (acceleration). So a short-term guess that "there will be a job for you in 1 year's time" is probably a fairly safe guess. But as a current student, you're presumably worried about 5 years, 10 years, 20 years down the line and whether or not you'll still have a career. And the simple truth is, we can't be sure. So what to do? My gut feeling is "continue to learn software engineering, but make sure to look for ways to broaden your skill base, and position
This point of view essentially reduces to the same place libertarians are at: Institutions are bad, Apple is bad, Google is bad, we should refuse to support institutions, or maybe even institutions should not exist, depending on how severe the FOSSism is. And look, I don't feel that libertarians (or, let's kill the analogy, FOSSers) are always wrong. Of course they're right about some things; they're just wrong about so much more than they're right about, its like a 90/10 split, its not close. I think the cognitive dissonance is something similar to chesterton's fence: FOSSers don't respect the massive profit-motivated and closed-source companies and systems which, at best, make pockets of productive, awesome open source possible; but more realistically and worse those pockets are just the software version of "buy a Subaru because we donate money to cancer research", they're free labor/recruiting/tax writeoff/community goodwill campaigns by gigacorps, and its all just profit at the end of the day. Nerds who can see the inside of the machine and are aware that this sort of thing happens is literally just stating in different terms the stereotype type-As assign to nerds: that they don't understand anything but the technology [1]. [1] this video
For starters: The old notion that engineers aren't good with people so don't let them talk to stakeholders [1]; so you end up with PMs/POs/EMs holding a monopoly on information gathering from stakeholders, which is at-best inefficient and more realistically less accurate. It becomes "viral" (it spreads) when it becomes institutionalized; when leaders say "no we want you focused on the code, so go into the basement and we'll talk in our 1-1 about your progress". People skills are a skill; its right there in the name, it needs to be developed and exercised. If you don't let your engineers out of the basement, you get engineers with bad people skills, and the prophecy writes itself. Those engineers with bad people skills prioritize the skills they have in themselves when hiring others, and so on, and so forth. This isn't me arguing that these PM/EM/PO roles shouldn't exist, to be clear; its more-so things that bad individuals in those roles may do. That being said, I do feel that the healthiest, most productive software teams I've been on had a few things in common: Less technical EMs, combination EM+PMs, or sharing a PM across multiple related teams in the same department. [1] this video
> look! i already told you! i deal with the god damned customers so the engineers don't have to! i have people skills! i am good at dealing with people! can't you understand that? what the hell is wrong with you people? (office space, this video ) look, lucumo, i'm sure you have excellent people skills. which is why you're writing five-paragraph power-trip-fantasy comments on hn about laughing in people's faces as you demonstrate your undeniable dominance over them, then take pity on them. but i'm not sure those comments really represent a contribution to the conversation about code greppability; they're just ego defense. you probably should not have posted them
> I just don't agree that it's a false equivalency. I see them both as "tools I use to get the job done". For me, the job is not "writing code" - it is "deliver feature", "fix bug", and the accountability, responsibility, and communication that comes with it. Hello, Tom Smykowski. You have people skills! this video