The Continual Preoccupation With “Soft Skills”
Comfort zones are there for a reason — for your wellbeing, happiness, and to reduce your stress.
I’m tired. Not just of the day to day nonsense that us software engineers in the Grand Game have to put up with from management and HR, but also from the continual doctrinal drivel focussing on us to “get out of our comfort zones” and “build up our soft skills.”
I don’t think it’s an old fashioned or regressive thing to say that I’m really happy in my own comfort zone as it’s comfortable (by design), it’s what I made deliberately for myself to be happy and content, and it’s pretty much relatively stress free as there’s nothing in there that alarms me.
It’s also a zone in which I can do all the things I want to do, as anything else I’d find uncomfortable to do — the clue there, management readers, is literally within the word itself.
If I challenge myself, I do it safely inside my own comfort zone¹.
I don’t have to step outside it even if I’m struggling with the obfuscated, yet wonderful, Wolfram Language, I have to look at some TypeScript for a few minutes before I replace it with half a dozen lines of Swift or C, or even if I have to endure micro-services from some fervent true believer who wants to convert everything within site to an endless series of APIs, all…
