Web Design

Personally the qualities listed of this person who had "good soft skills" aren't good soft skills. People pleasing isn't a soft skill, is just being soft.

Communication and collaboration often necesitate conflict, and conflict isn't bad. Conflixt is often the stimulus for gorwth. Someone with good soft skills knows how to have "positive conflicts" and can be assistive with ideas and limitations.

I don't disagree with the assessment that most people's self assessment of soft skills means they are passivr people pleasers rather than compassionate assertive listeners and problem solvers.

Being “soft-skilled” as a “yes man” is easy. Being “soft-skilled” while negotiating between parties in a principled manner is much harder. I might try to suss out examples of how an applicant has navigated such difficult situations in the past.

The bigger question is how you hire UX designers that don't just think about the "X" of the most unskilled, tech illiterate "U"s and force everyone down to that level. The number of times I've seen complex but time saving features taken away under the guise of "simplifying" the interface is infuriating.

"Our dumbest users can't figure out how the existing group select/filter button works on a list of items so go ahead and individually click the checkbox for all 100 items because fuck you." This actually happened with a cloud based service I had to use for work once.

Also the classic "Let's make you click on each list item which opens a new page with the action buttons instead of putting the most common ones on the list itself because we care about how clean the interface looks more than the people who have to do repetitive tasks on each list item."

Also "Error messages are scary so we'll be as vague and condescending as possible and if you actually want to troubleshoot the ten million abstractions we hide behind a single button you can go fuck yourself." And its friend "We made a slick single page web app that only has one URL so you can't send the page you're on to your team members."

Honorable mention to "Instead of cluttering the interface with grayed out buttons, we'll pretend the options you don't have permission to access don't exist to make it as hard as possible to figure out what you're doing wrong or what permission you need to ask IT/your manager for."

Yeah so people don’t understand the value of being an argumentative son of a bitch sometimes at work (within reason). Literally yesterday I had a product person put in a request from a developer to get content to write and translate, basically, some text that the voiceover/talkback system would say automatically. My designer was about to just forward the request but it was such outlier that it triggered a 10 minute phone call that struck the requirement, struck the request and saved everyone involved from implementing something stupid/wasteful/unnecessary. So yeah, you do need to use some actual judgement in the job.

This is really helpful as someone who's been in the job market for wayyyy too long (and someone who has plenty of soft skills) What do you look for in resumes now? Specifically, what skills or verbiage?

I might be in this picture and don't like it. I abhor conflict so tend to agree with everyone, sometimes it leads to urgent deadlines. It's definitely something I need to work on, especially now that I have a mirror put up against me lol.

I guess the difference is I don't advertise having amazing "soft skills" because I'm too introverted for that.