Definitely not. Anyone growing up immersed in face-saving, high pressure, competition and possibly self-help influencers telling them how to achieve will exhibit these sorts of behaviors. Doesn't matter if you're white or black.
Overall, it'll be a worse world if you can't make a living purely on hard skills.
If soft skills is mostly about sucking up, and there is no demand for any hard skill, you'll find society less able to stand up to the pressures of a majority group, because guess what, they're all too scared to stand up as an individual for fear of dropping the ball on the soft skill.
Moreover, the game theory of the soft skill is treacherous and uncertain. There's too many unknown unknowns, it's like not knowing if the dice you're playing is loaded against you. You don't know how many cultural land mines you might step on when interacting with your superior, or if there's a glass ceiling enforced by a group who will nitpick on minor irrelevant 'faults'.
Whereas compare soft skills to hard skills, you have a major advantage in certainty. There is a dice loaded in your favor. You know you can get much of the stuff done, and once you've reached the desired results, that's all there is to it.
I also could go on on how soft skills erodes human's capacity for judging what is value, instead basing their opinions on the majority source of opinions... It'll definitely be a much more irrational world to live in.
I'm sorry, but that's nonsense. Soft skills are mostly definitely not about sucking up.
At a previous job, the PM for another team often asked me to join some of their meetings — her engineers were shit at talking to non-technical people, so, for critical meetings, she asked me to join to serve as an interpreter of sorts. That's soft skills at work.
Talking to stakeholders and understanding what they need? Soft skills. Understanding the different between important and urgent? Soft skills. Being able to assess a candidate during an interview? Soft skills. Navigating cultural differences when you have offices or suppliers abroad? Soft skills.
I'd go as far as to say that the single biggest difference between a junior and a senior engineer is how well developed their soft skills are.
Perhaps it's a poor choice of words, what I mean by 'sucking up' refers to understanding the counterparty's mind (and making decisions to close the deal), and it is definitely a part of the game.
Every single thing that you listed requires a understanding of the opposing party that you just talked about in order to make the deal work out. A boss has his/her temper to deal with, her engineers have their own preferences, and that sucks, because as I said the game of soft skills can be a cultural landmine equivalent to rolling a dice with unknown odds.
If that is the only game in town, the result could turn out to be like the USA's politics of today, with no way to deviate/defect if you disagree.
Honestly, the way you conflate soft skills with randomness and capital-P Politics is worrisome.
> Every single thing that you listed requires a understanding of the opposing party that you just talked about in order to make the deal work out.
Yes, that's the whole point! Understanding other people is an important life skill, and something that every neurotypical person should be able to do. (And, if you're not neurotypical, it's a limitation about yourself that you need to acknowledge)
See it this way: You have two people in your team who disagree on a technical issue. You need to help them come to a decision. Would you rather have those two people have the mindset that "other engineers have their own preferences and that sucks", or that they have the mindset that "other engineers have their own preferences as a result of their own experience, and I welcome navigating those differences as part of the job"? Which of those two conversations ends with the two engineers understanding why the other person has a different opinion, and reaching a reasonable compromise? Which conversation ends with everybody involved learning something new, making the team technically stronger?
Because soft skills is also dealing with politics, you can't separate the 2.
> See it this way: You have two people in your team who disagree on a technical issue. You need to help them come to a decision.
You lay out a very hopeful scenario. Sometimes there are some issues where there are no clear cut answers (ie. you cannot apply a objective value judgement) and it's a purely political play. If you are asked to solve the issue, you have to take a side either way, and whichever side you take you will piss off the other, possibly for good. If the side you judged in favor of fails, you might end up being on the chopping block, or be 'marked' by the organisation with a 'never-do-well' label. This is -the- landmine I'm talking about.
You had better hope there are support in the org that can still support you, because depending on the severity of the fallout, you might be starting from 0. You'd better hope hard skills are still valuable by then.
But most of the things you're describing as bad can also be described as a lack of soft skills. The person who can't take care of themselves and rolls over under pressure definitely has poor soft skills.
Indeed, video games are probably the things most of humanity will retire to if they didn't attach so much ego and meaning to their jobs and by extension, the people around them.
Just be sure to swap games once in a while so you don't get bored.
Keep widening the context. Last thing we need is a developer with rent on their minds, influenced by internet comments, developing on linux and being ignorant of the realities there.
Also it's worth noting throughout history, the incumbent world power will have clashes with the up and coming power to the throne. A lot of propaganda will be dispensed from both sides. Be critical of such information lest you become a useful idiot.
When you start presuming that the cause of this is that China is evil and wants world domination, let me remind you that it's the propaganda getting to you.
China had a mandate to contribute to climate action goals years ago. Their government sponsored that growth. Now their companies need to make a profit and selling overseas. It's simple free market forces.
Maybe you're forgetting something but genAI does produce value. Subjective value, yes. But still value to others who can make use of them.
End of the day your current prosperity is made by advances in energy and technology. It would be disingenuous to deny that and to deny the freedom of others to progress in their field of study.
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