If being social means having small talk than it doesn’t help with your hard problems but various forms of social interaction do help.
In many fields networking is essential to success. Many people in this community might be more successful if they had better social skills and that requires practice.
Distinctly social strikes me as reading a newspaper.
In many fields networking is essential to success.
These statements do not disagree with each other. If it is necessary to be social, be social. If I worked in a job where knowing what paper-reader attitude is, then I would read the paper. But I wouldn’t read the weekend paper for fun.
I would not be encouraging social more than it is necessary. Unless you have a strategy surrounding trying to be in the right place at the right time for serendipitous opportunity.
Even computer programmers who spent the majority of their working output working alone can benefit a lot from having good connections when it comes to finding good jobs.
Finding jobs isn’t the only thing were social connection helps. If you have an health issue than it can help a lot if you have a friend who knows a good doctor. If the friend has a personal relationship to the doctor it might mean that you get an immediate appointment instead of having to wait weeks.
I personally don’t do social events like board game nights that are basically superficial fun but prefer events with provide additional value, but I think it’s a mistake to see social events generally as low value.
Even computer programmers who spent the majority of their working output working alone can benefit a lot from having good connections when it comes to finding good jobs.
People skills have great value for programmers, and finding jobs is a very small part of it. I write this from personal experience.
Programmers are still people. The amount of great software any one person can write in their lifetime is very limited. Teaching or convincing others (from coworkers to the rest of the world) to agree with you on what makes software great, to write great software themselves, and to use it, are the greatest force multipliers any programmer can have, just like in most other fields.
Sometimes there are exceptions; one may invent a new algorithm or write some new software that everyone agrees is great. But most of the time you have to convince people—not just less-technical managers making purchasing decisions, but other programmers who don’t think that global mutable state is a problem, really, it worked fine in my grandfather’s time and it’s good enough for me.
Yes, but we didn’t disagree on the value of people skills but on the other value social interaction outside of work. You are mostly convincing your coworkers while you are at work and not a social hangouts.
Convincing the rest of the world to adopt programming technique X is more likely done via the internet then through social hangouts.
I think you’re mostly right about that, but not entirely. The two realms are not so clearly separated. There are social hangouts on the Internet. There are social hangouts, of both kinds, where people talk shop. There are programming blogs and forums where social communities emerge. And social capital and professional reputation feed into one another.
If being social means having small talk than it doesn’t help with your hard problems but various forms of social interaction do help.
In many fields networking is essential to success. Many people in this community might be more successful if they had better social skills and that requires practice.
These statements do not disagree with each other. If it is necessary to be social, be social. If I worked in a job where knowing what paper-reader attitude is, then I would read the paper. But I wouldn’t read the weekend paper for fun.
I would not be encouraging social more than it is necessary. Unless you have a strategy surrounding trying to be in the right place at the right time for serendipitous opportunity.
Even computer programmers who spent the majority of their working output working alone can benefit a lot from having good connections when it comes to finding good jobs.
Finding jobs isn’t the only thing were social connection helps. If you have an health issue than it can help a lot if you have a friend who knows a good doctor. If the friend has a personal relationship to the doctor it might mean that you get an immediate appointment instead of having to wait weeks.
I personally don’t do social events like board game nights that are basically superficial fun but prefer events with provide additional value, but I think it’s a mistake to see social events generally as low value.
People skills have great value for programmers, and finding jobs is a very small part of it. I write this from personal experience.
Programmers are still people. The amount of great software any one person can write in their lifetime is very limited. Teaching or convincing others (from coworkers to the rest of the world) to agree with you on what makes software great, to write great software themselves, and to use it, are the greatest force multipliers any programmer can have, just like in most other fields.
Sometimes there are exceptions; one may invent a new algorithm or write some new software that everyone agrees is great. But most of the time you have to convince people—not just less-technical managers making purchasing decisions, but other programmers who don’t think that global mutable state is a problem, really, it worked fine in my grandfather’s time and it’s good enough for me.
Yes, but we didn’t disagree on the value of people skills but on the other value social interaction outside of work. You are mostly convincing your coworkers while you are at work and not a social hangouts.
Convincing the rest of the world to adopt programming technique X is more likely done via the internet then through social hangouts.
I think you’re mostly right about that, but not entirely. The two realms are not so clearly separated. There are social hangouts on the Internet. There are social hangouts, of both kinds, where people talk shop. There are programming blogs and forums where social communities emerge. And social capital and professional reputation feed into one another.
Spending time on programming blogs and forums isn’t what most people label as traditionally as social interaction and I don’t think what Eliot meant.