Part of the soft skills that are useful for a developer is being able to frame your crucial questions in a way that makes their importance relevant to their world.
Perhaps soft skills are too squishy and/or broad of a term to be useful then. It seems like these discussions always go "maybe you, as the developer, just need to learn how to do soft skills properly?" in response to business types exhibiting an undesirable behavior. Sure, smooth talking and playing into someones personality might be more successful (albeit with a lot more hot air), but all of you are supposed to be working towards a goal. If someone gets hung up because you weren't smooth enough, I would think they're a bad faith actor who doesn't actually want to get something done.
But I’m not talking about “smooth talking” here; in response to the above example —- where engineering is asking questions that that the business things had not answered because they are presumably “unimportant” —- there is almost certainly a communication breakdown happening.
Likely, one of the following is happening:
* The questions are important to the business but engineering has failed to articulate why getting the answers are critical to the business. (Some engineers have a tendency to describe problems in the scope of how it affects their own job or task, but neglect the larger picture or fail to articulate any consequences)
* The questions actually aren’t important for the business to answer and the engineer fails to understand how their task supports the goals of the business
* The questions are important but they cannot be answered by the business. The engineer might need to gather more information before to generate actionable questions, or maybe the questions should be answered by engineering themselves.
Remember, technical workers, you must grind all you soft skills in addition to the technical ones, so that you can successfully interact with those people hired exclusively to use their soft skills.
Engineers just need to have good enough soft skills to effectively communicate.
Engineers who struggle to do that are just as bad at their job as business managers who aren’t technical enough to operate Microsoft Office. There’s a minimum of both hard and soft skills that anyone in a professional environment should have.
Again, by communicating. If someone doesn't know what they are building, who they are building it for, and why -- then they do not have a solid grasp of the requirements.
It definitely happens at bloated organizations that aren’t really good at software development. I think it is especially more common in organizations where software is a cost center and business rules involve a specialized discipline that software developers wouldn’t typically have expertise in.
Well, it is. Let's say that AI adds emojis to my code/text. Me, a millennial who hates emojis, will tell the AI to delete those emojis and never use them again in my code or my official documents. The gen Z guy who got his first job last week will love to keep them.
I've noticed coworkers starting to use them in communication (emails, Teams chats, meeting minutes) so now maybe I see others doing it I feel it is fun and acceptable and might throw some in too. I wouldn't put them in code or EDC or any source documentation but an email sure why not.
I did have a scientist recently write a list of lab best practices and before he wrote the list he had a note "Follow instructions below" and then he had a finger pointing DOWN emoji pointing to the list... my work bestie and I actually screenshotted that and sent it to each other and were giggling about it, because he generally is a serious, smart, straight-laced dude and him putting in a garish down facing bright yellow finger emoji just seemed very silly compared to his personality. But it caught our attention and ensured we both read his list!
I would say the uptick is also partly responsible from people using their phones more often during work communication, if he sent that email from his phone instead of his computer it was easier to throw in an emoji to emphasize his important list.
There’s an option in ChatGPT’s settings to lessen the use of emojis. Though most people never bother to change the default setting and I didn’t know of it myself until recently.
If you can tell it instructions, and you know you can tell it instructions, then how smart do you have to be to realize that "omit emojis" is an instruction you can use? If what you said is true, I have no hope...
Most people are not anything like anyone on this website. But even if your personal opinions were universally shared, there is no way that what you are suggesting could even be mathematically possible. Gen-Z, being 15 years wide, enters the workforce at approximately 7% per year.
There were not ~800% more gen-z healthcare workers in 2025 than there were in 2024.
That doesn't really change what I said though. It isn't crazy to call it useless without some form of ALS either. Given that old school synthesis has been able to do it for like 20 years or so.
No? But is it not unreasonable to expect "state of the art" TTS to be able to do at least what old school synthesis is capable of doing? Being "state of the art" means being the highest level of development or achievement in a particular field, device, procedure, or technique at a specific point in time. I don't think it's therefore unreasonable to expect supposed "state of the art" text-to-speech synthesis to do far better at everything old-school TTS could do and then some.
> Being "state of the art" means being the highest level of development or achievement in a particular field, device, procedure, or technique at a specific point in time. I don't think it's therefore unreasonable to expect supposed "state of the art" text-to-speech synthesis to do far better at everything old-school TTS could do and then some.
Non sequitur. Unless the 'art' in question is the 'art of adding features', usually this phrase is to describe the quality of a very specific development, these are often not even feature complete products.
I'd imagine it is because several of the obvious options for "lying" here may violate criminal law. And also because the EFF is an civil liberties advocacy group, they want to change the law, not circumvent it.
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