The Rising Demand for Soft Skills in Engineering | LinkedIn’s VPE Aarathi Vidyasagar

0:00Soft skills have been something that's important throughout, right? I mean, it's not new, but with the onset of generative AI and coming in and taking away some of the mundane, how do you differentiate yourself? So as an engineer, you've got to bring things that are not easily applicable. And so things like communication, leadership, soft skills become even more important. They've always been important. Like if you look at, you know, success criteria, if you look at leaders in the industry today, you would see that a lot of it has to do with communication leadership. Like the soft skills do play a big role in terms of growth, etc.

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1:13Head to the show notes to register for our upcoming workshop on September 24th or 25th. Hey, everyone. Welcome back to Dev Interrupted. I'm your host, Conor Bronson, and today I'm delighted to be joined by Arthi Vidya-Sagar, VP of Engineering at LinkedIn. Arthi, thank you so much for joining us on the show today. Thank you for having me. Excited to have this conversation. You've got some really interesting perspectives that you're bringing. And according to new data recently released by LinkedIn, the demand for soft skills among engineers is on the rise. It's something you and I've talked about a little bit.

1:45In this six-month period from 2022 to 2023, across the US, UK, and India markets, communication was consistently in the top five for skills gaining the most share in demand. And at the same time, I know there's a previous LinkedIn study that found that engineers with strong soft skills are promoted 13 % faster than those with only technical skills. And we've seen this even continue to rise in importance as this is happening with the backdrop of Gen.ai's transformation of software development. Do you think that these industry changes are helping drive the desire for communication and other soft skills among engineers?

2:20I think I want to start with community soft skills have been something that's important throughout, right? I mean, it's not new, but with the onset of generative AI and coming in and taking away some of the mundane, like, you know, your coding, et cetera, it's how do you differentiate yourself. So as an engineer, you've got to bring things that are not easily applicable. And so things like communication, leadership, soft skills become even more important. They've always been important. Like if you look at, you know, success criteria, if you look at leaders in the industry today, you would see that a lot of it has to do with communication, leadership, like the soft skills do play a big role in terms of growth, et cetera.

3:02But now it's just ever more important. Like, you know, going back to like our mathematical theorem, while it was sufficient once upon a time, I think it becomes necessary now with the changes that are coming in because some of the other skills that kind of helped you stand out might be easily replicable now with generative AI and the tech changes that are coming in. And we've had variations of this conversation here on Dev Interrupted before. Our listeners may be kind of groaning hearing me talk about communication. They're like, oh, every leader who's really good at their job talks about the importance of communication.

3:34I think the difference here is LinkedIn has this massive pool of data to back this up and say, look, we can actually look at the job market and say, this is something that's highly valued. This is something that is increasing importance. And it aligns to your point to these transformational shifts that are happening and how software development works today. Yeah, I think, look, LinkedIn has been doing this whole skill based hiring, understanding skills, mapping skills. This has been a journey that's not started just because of the generative AI movement. But now that it's happened, us having this information and this breakdown just makes it even more important to kind of see where the trends go, right?

4:16What are the trends that people are looking at? What skills are most important here? How do we begin to differentiate? This is where we as engineering leaders have to come together, start looking at what we now call a talent map, a skills map to see what those gaps are, what those trends are, and where do we need to go. So I think it's super important to know that soft skills, again, not easily replicable. So again, nothing new, right? This is not a new formula. This is something that's been true. For us to be good engineers, you've got to bring the set of people along with you. Communication becomes key.

4:52Again, we're not talking about auditorial skills, right? That's not what we're asking for. Or just being able to communicate your ideas, bringing the team along is what you're looking for. And a lot of that distills into what differentiates. It's that little bit of salt in the dish that makes you better. And I think you're really apt here because we see other technology transformations that may not necessarily wholesale change what's happening within a market or industry like software development. But it does accelerate underlying conditions. and as you pointed out communication has been crucial for leaders for years how do you manage a product team how do you make sure that your relationships within the org are tight so that you get the backing and support and resources you need how do you make sure your team's actually staying on track and aligned to business priorities actually getting the work done that you need to get done but we're also seeing this major transformation and how software development itself may work in the coming years whether that's on the no code side whether that's prompt engineering, changing where we spend our focus on workflows.

5:53How and how much do you see software development changing in the coming years? I think, again, going back to us understanding skills, I think there was a study on LinkedIn where we saw what we were expecting, that 50 % of the skills to do a job, it was going to change by 2030. And what we saw is from 2015 to 2023 is when that kind of change happened. With the onset of, you know, technological changes, like in a generative AI, we expect the curve for that to become a lot steeper. As in, like, I think in another five years, we will be expecting, I think we expect it to be 68 % of the skills to do a job is going to be changing.

6:36Like to put it in perspective, two thirds of what I needed to do my job, you know, 15 years ago, it looks very different. So there is a saying that our CEO uses quite a bit, which is jobs are not changing. I mean, we're not changing jobs, but jobs are changing on us. And that's very true, right? So what skills we need to do the same job 15 years ago to today is going to be completely different. So with that as a backdrop, really think about where we are as software engineering leaders, just software engineers, right? So we have to be upskilling, reskilling, thinking about what does it mean? what does it mean to be a full stack engineer is very different from what it was when I started life.

7:18And now I'm going to begin to date myself and tell you a mouthful, so literally, to, you know, what it is today. I mean, there were like differentiated fields like, you know, ops engineers or SREs, those quality engineers, different stuff. And over time, all of those have been merging, right? So the team structure, the team formations have changed. And with the most recent sort of changes with AI kind of becoming ubiquitous, what we see now is I think full stack should include a reasonable awareness, understanding, and competency in the field of AI, ML, and, you know, understanding data science.

7:57Like, without that, you can't be an effective software engineer. So how do you then, as a software leader, kind of help enable, you know, transform your teams that the right way. Again, nothing that we haven't done before. Remember, we've gone through the no QA revolution. We've gone through the ops engineering becoming DevOps. So it's not like this particular ecosystem has sustained all these changes. We've been able to do it, but I think it's a constant change. The big differentiation now is that the pace of change, I think, is what is going to be the challenge that we'll have to keep up with.

8:31It is funny to think about this because I think you'll hear a lot of successful people like yourself talk about this need for reskilling, this need for being a lifelong learner and loving learning. And my wife, Catherine, talks about the fact that her job that she does, which is CRM automation and lifecycle management, didn't really exist when she went to high school. Like it was barely a thing. Salesforce was just getting started. And this is, I think, true for a lot of us where the definition of, as you point out, a full stack engineer has changed over the years. How we do our jobs day by day is changing over the years.

9:04So how are you approaching that skill transition at LinkedIn for your team of more than 600 engineers? Again, like I said, I think it's not a new problem. We've had to reskill, upskill changes. I mean, again, at the risk of dating myself, when I started, like when I studied CS, it was more in the Perl C++. And I don't know if you're folks that are like, you know, developers, like doing memory allocations, knowing how sort of the basics work to Java to where we are today. I think a lot has changed. I think the big piece here is the pace of change, the rate of change that is going to be there. So I think this is where being that mapping of what skills we need to where we need to go.

9:50So constant need for upskill, reskill, constant need to sort of think about what are some specialist roles and what are some generalist roles in the team. So as leaders, you know, encouraging, I mean, look, most developers, most people like me that have gone through the cycle are honestly academicians at heart. Like, you know, this learning and getting to learn. It's just it's second nature to us. You've gone through so many years of studying. You know, this whole learning is something that comes more and more naturally. So I would be like really highly recommend that. But I think with the pace of change, one of the things that we are trying to do, and remember, as part of my job, I also run the LinkedIn Learning product.

10:33So this is where, like, you know, curating the right bite-sized learning opportunities to upscale. So there's this pace of, like, how can I give people the right amount of knowledge so they can get to the right level? Because I don't think we're getting to PhD level of upskilling, reskilling. It's going to happen at a rapid pace. versus can I know enough to be that sort of, you know, reasonably good at being more of the generalist. And then of course, there's going to be the need for the specialists and then opportunities to get deep, deep in there. And that's a whole different, like your traditional education system.

11:10But a lot of what we're trying to do, even with LinkedIn learning courses, and here's where I want to make a pitch for my product, is putting those bite-sized, you know, learning courses as we've I think generated over 250 like AI based courses we do about 14 like 20 different languages this is where like I think and this is not just LinkedIn learning right like most learning platforms now are coming into that world of giving the right like sort of set of information that's current like tasty enough so just to give you an example some of the things that we've tried with my sort of team is A, educating the leaders, which is the managers, to become savvy and aware to understand what generative AI means and what does the technology stack mean?

11:56What do systems, what's the machinery that goes into it? And then sort of enabling much deeper coursework for more hands-on, you know, giving opportunities for learning for engineers to kind of, like from an apps domain, sort of dabble into prompt engineering, which is probably the entry level into more of the data world, right? So I think just sort of encouraging that slow transformation, again, to get more of the data generalists in the system as the full stack, and then sort of giving the right opportunities for people who might want to go deeper into that specialist world. I mean, there's a big difference that the deep AI folks or the PhDs who understand all of the depth of, you know, deep linear, you know, regression equations, et cetera, which is not something that'll come naturally.

12:48I mean, I, for example, hate statistics or never survived or thrived in it. But again, need to know enough to be at least aware and empathize with the team and be able to do that. So again, a big part about is encouraging that. So as a culture, sort of changing the emphasis for learning and reskilling, providing the right opportunities to people to get that taste of what that reskilling would look like to deeper and better opportunities there. But again, I think this is where the opportunity for online classes, democratizing some of that education system, I think is going to become more and more important for us.

13:30Again, technical revolution here. It's easy to curate and make those courses and bring it to life. I think you see a lot of startups come in here. And as a learning product owner, we see a lot of that competition as well. You mentioned something there that I want to dig into a bit, which is that there's definitely a need for improvement for generalists, people to pick up skills and understand some of these new technologies, some of these new approaches. And there's also this need for specialists. And I wonder if you think the ratio of those needs is starting to change with the current era of software development and how it's transitioning.

14:08Do you think engineering leaders should be constructing their teams or changing those ratios of specialists to more generalists or maybe even like more leadership roles compared to how they were doing in the past? Yeah, I think, like, remember there was in the previous world, or at least the traditional sort of differentiation between AI versus apps, if you really think about it. The AI teams were mostly the specialists that went deep into sort of the models, etc. I think with this sort of change of tech and the pace at which we're going, we're going to get to a world where a lot of our sort of platforms, open source, is going to be the no-code, low-code kind of areas where lots of the model marketplace is going to be just like robust, right?

14:54And then there's a little bit of the marriage of what you want to do. So I think this is where you can be like pretty effective in being able to sort of use that catalog of information with the sort of generalists. So you do need the generalists, but you can't like, I think that the need for specialists doesn't go away because who then builds these platforms and the deeper sort of, you know, the chat GPT kind of technology. platforms, right? I think it's just, it may not be the nature of thing. There's going to be a whole segment of, you know, platform development that changes to this whole, how do I build the low code, no code, you know, broader case of depth there.

15:40And then the utilization of that and how that sort of changes into the applications and the applicability, I think is going to become different. So I think there's going to be a little bit of difference. So for somebody like me that runs like an application team that builds on top of a lot of these platforms. I would expect that I need to get more of the generalist while start beginning to depend on more and more of the platform developers. I mean, like our partnership with OpenAI, Microsoft kind of stuff, like more and more. We see the pace of change, the depth of sort of changes and the technological changes, the pace at which it's going.

16:18if you're not somebody who's innovating in that sort of deep space you will not be moving at the pace like it'll be hard for you to kind of keep pace you'll keep yourself keep falling behind so i think this need for adaptability to this open source being able to sort of like at the current pace i think it's going to become more and more important so again depends on who you are Like if you are AWS, OpenAI, I think the kind of mix that you're going to have probably your need for specialists more versus if you were a sales force or a product team or a startup coming up in an area. I think the kind of things that you need to do would look a little bit different.

17:02That makes total sense. And I imagine this is somewhere where LinkedIn probably feels well positioned. given that we're seeing more and more repeated tasks become automated and LinkedIn's had this consistent skills first hiring approach. Do you think that LinkedIn as a company is well positioned for this new era? Yeah, I mean, just think about the mission for LinkedIn, right, is to connect every member of the workforce for the opportunity. And so this has been a problem space, like work and connecting people to work has been an area that we've been ideating for, you know, years now. This is what we do.

17:43So again, having that framework of skills just kind of helps us like bring and automate, make that automation that much more easier. Even for us to be able to sort of think about what are some disruptible skills versus what are some augmentable skills with generative AI? what are skills, you know, the new skills that might come up to where is directionally, where are people going? I think this is where LinkedIn's well positioned because of who we are in the platform and our sort of economic graph, understanding some of those changes and the nuances and also helping that transformation. And as we help, you know, define jobs, understand jobs, work.

18:27I think being at the heart of that is going to be a big piece of what we do. And that's actually why I come into work every day and I'm excited about it. Well, you're making a good pitch for the company, so I'm sure the PR team is happy to hear it. And I do think, though, there are going to be some engineers who listen to this conversation and get a little worried and think, you know what, how do I balance sharpening my technical skills, especially as the kind of what is state of the art is constantly changing and changing aggressively right now. while also trying to develop, you know, more leadership skills and move into leadership and add my communication skills.

19:05Like, how do you balance that as someone who is maybe early or mid-career? I think my advice to people is, like, you know, this always-on learning is a really, really good mantra for somebody who's in any kind of, like, a technological role. I don't think it's a new thing, right? I mean, every leadership conversation I've had, I've talked about, you know, I've always been a lifetime learner. Challenges like, you know, sort of pushing myself on the boundaries of learning new things, not becoming too comfortable has always been something that's driven me. Only difference now is, again, I go back to the analogy of it was a sufficient thing, but now it just becomes necessary.

19:51So you just have to become very intentional about it. and I don't think you can like just leave it to chance or be organic about it right so I think this is where you also have to understand that things are changing you have to keep pace so you kind of have to invest in that learning cycle just becoming very intentional and this is not just on the engineers and the individual so I don't want to throw the onus of that you know upskilling reskilling and just on the engineers themselves I think we all as organizations need to a enable that transformation, recognize the cost for that transformation and shepherd that.

20:30Like, and if we don't, if we can't do that, I think we will fail our engineers and that's not the right place to be. So I think as a leader, I kind of see that as one of my biggest roles in this moment is to make sure, how do I make sure I give people a space to learn? I make it okay to spend that time and just make that a very intentional thing. I mean, again, just a little bit of the culture thing. I think a long time ago, I'd read a book, Atomic Habits, so change little things, you know, and so that it becomes a pattern over time. So this bite-sized learning kind of fits into that. Like, you know, how do you then encourage that, recognize that, you know, give people the space and time.

21:14So I think this is all where if we as organizations need to start making this kind of move from that sufficient condition to necessary condition transition just needs to be something that we all have to come together and make it very intentionally. I completely agree. I think it can be challenging sometimes, especially in high pressure roles at companies that are driven to achieve to make that time for learning. And that's where I think leadership and organizations need to be really intentional because it's hard in the moment to see, oh, well, I have to deliver, you know, these different epics.

21:49We need to complete this product line. We have these challenges to do. We have products to roll out. We have, you know, business critical things. But if we ignore the bigger picture of how are we building for the long term, how are we building our teams for the long term? We burn people out. We don't set them up for success at the next stage. and we risk so much. And that could be a really challenging thing for leaders to navigate. So I'm glad we're having this conversation about it. I want to drill back in around soft skills because we've talked a bit about communication and some of these kind of crucial project leadership, project management skills that really help enable people to get things done at companies.

22:27What specific skills or techniques would you advise people who are moving into engineering leadership to think about honing? Yeah, I think communications leadership sometimes becomes such generic terms. For me, I think, look, end of the day communication as a leader, sort of the biggest challenge you have to face or you will face is bringing your team along on ideas, product, technology. Almost like evangelizing that part of communication. And so the most crucial skill, which then as you grow, you know, through the sort of corporate ranks becomes like that's a skill that you start using outward, like to your peers, then to your sort of, you know, superiors and then like, you know, to cross-functional leaders.

23:21It just does. So the scope or the aperture for that kind of changes. So I think the biggest piece is that crisp communication of intent and the why and the idea of bringing people along. Because it's never, I mean, a lot of people, I mean, I've got teenage kids who are like, well, you're the boss. You get to tell people what to do and they'll do it. And in all honesty, that's not how the world works, right? That's a little bit of, I've got to convince my team. This is what, you know, this is a great idea. Here's what's going to be good for us. This is the vision. You got to get them excited because when you do it right, it's a wonderful experience versus like, you know, do it because I say so is just never the right sort of form to do it.

24:05So I think for me, communication is about that. Like, how do you sort of message and appeal to the, you know, your audience, whoever that audience is, whether it's your boss, whether it's your peers, whether it's your customer or even just your team. I think just distilling that and that's a, and it's a truly soft skill, right? Because it's a little bit of a, it's more of an art than a science at this moment. It's like understanding your audience, what sort of makes them tick, like in that moment, sort of distilling that and then being able to communicate. So I think it's just that. And it's also why something, you know, that AI probably can't sort of do it as effectively because you and I are talking.

24:48So this is me understanding what is Conor like or what would sort of, you know, make him tick and then sort of, you know, adjusting it. So it's also like maybe in some way saying there is a salesman role in you that you have to hone and sort of bring it to the right sort of efficacy. So in all honesty, sometimes I've always joked about it, but I do think it's actually a good exercise. Everybody should do a tour of duty in sales. is a thing that'll help you kind of like learn some of that that art because that's the art right from a communications perspective to kind of nail it i hate to admit it but one of the most formative jobs i ever had was like a summer job when i was in college where i did door-to-door fundraising uh for a non-profit and it was really really hard it was like honing sales skills was talking to all these people was trying to you know develop my emotional intelligence i i cried a couple of times doing that job.

25:46It was hard. I had like quotas to meet and I'd also, it's one of the things that I've learned the most from and I've been able to like grow as a person out of. So I completely agree. I think this kind of ability to sell an idea and pitch people, like I think a lot of folks in software development want to think they're, I'll say like too good for sales sometimes where it's like, Oh, my product's going to be incredible. It's going to sell itself. And there's something to be said for product virality and the ability to have a product that can have a great K factor and spread itself. But you still need to be able to be great at distribution.

26:20You still need to be able to get your team on board because, as you said, the difference between someone who's inspired and fired up to work on something and thinks they're making a difference and thinks what they do is impactful versus someone who's just checking a box to get a salary is huge. It also brings up something else, which is kind of the collaboration factor. So you've talked a lot about how do you inspire a team? How do you bring them along? How do you get your team to work together themselves better? Again, a lot of software engineers, developers that I meet, like all of us engineers, we like to believe we are introverts, which we probably are, by the way.

26:53Right. And so there's this, there's a myth of it's not something that comes naturally to you. But I think they are actually pretty orthogonal, right? I mean, yes, you can be an introvert. That doesn't mean you cannot communicate or learn that skill and be able to like you don't have to be a social be to to be able to do what this is. I honestly think I'm I'm an introvert, but here I am talking to you on a podcast and, you know, I guess talking more than one sentence. So in the moment, it's not about that, right? It's more about what you feel passionately about and can you bring that out and doing justice to who you are, I think becomes an important thing.