Soft Skills by John Z. Sonmez (2015)

Overview

This book is a compilation of career advice for software developers. However, the concepts covered are transferable to other careers. The chapters are relatively short to read, most are just a couple of pages long. The book is easy to read, and the author makes his material approachable. It is written in a way that appears to be short articles that could have been pulled from his own personal blog. He has many personal anecdotes and analogies to help understand the ideas that he is presenting.

The chapters are listed under several key sections which are:

  • Career
  • Marketing Yourself
  • Learning
  • Productivity
  • Financial
  • Fitness
  • Spirit

I would recommend this book for a quick read. The information covered is just the tip of the iceberg, so I would encourage you to read books that are focussed more on one topic. Also be aware that the author had a career and life path that may not be easily followed.

The Good

I found the book to contain fairly good advice in general. The key chapter and one thing I would walk away with is chapter 21 starting page 121. This chapter is called “Creating a Wildly Successful Blog” The reasons for creating a blog are:

  • an online portfolio that you can point to for future employers, and peers
  • a record of your development over time
  • a place to market your goods and/ or services
  • a website for inbound marketing (where the customer approaches you rather than you having to go out of your way to find them).
  • a place to develop your communication skills

A blog takes a long time to curate before it’ll become noticed in your networks. This is okay because at the start you’re not going to be writting the best stuff anyway. After a year or so of consistently making posts and updating your website you’ll find the blog starts to pay itself off. The author also provides tips on getting your blog more traffic.

Apart from this chapter the author gives advice on how to provide value to other people, how to work with others, and progress in your career. The advice he gives is fairly standard but to have it in one book is helpful. This means that the book can act as a reference if that is what you want to use it for.

The Bad

One chapter I had difficultly agreeing with was the chapter on burnout. Chapter 42 is titled “Burnout: I’ve got the cure!” and the author attempts to explain his method for getting around burnout. His cure is to push through burnout and get to the other side. The author claims that as you approach burnout

I believe the author doesn’t understand what “burnout” actually is, and hasn’t defined it well. Burnout is when productivity plummets, not increases. Signs of approaching burnout are similar to signs of depression: lack of motivation, malaise, and decline in productivity.

What I think the author is referring to is a lack in endurance. Endurance can be developed further and can be worked on over several days and weeks. The experience of improving your endurance for a task is something like seeing a fitness or hobby progression. At the beginning of a new hobby or fitness regime, we probably have a lost of motivation to push through learning new skills and the like. This high motivation can take you through a lot of the beginning difficulties, however, the honeymoon doesn’t last. Then you hit a plateau. To get past the plateau you have to be consistent in your practice of the skills involved. Plateaus can last a long time, sometimes it just takes consistency of practice to get past the plateau and at other times it requires innovation to navigate. This is where a mentor, or doing knowledge discovery can help to get out.

So where the author uses the term “burnout” I think he actually means the term “plateau”. Burnout is a mental health issue that is not well understood. It can cause health issues beyond just the mind. I don’t recommend trying to push through a burnout, but I do recommend working through a plateau with careful consideration.

The Interesting

In chapter 55, page 332, the author summarises his life path. He explains some of his ups and downs from when he started in the workforce at 19 until he retired at 33.

In this chapter, I’ll tell you my story. I’m not holding anything back. I’ll tell you exactly how I did it and the mistakes and triumphs I had along the way.

He then writes:

About that same time, my renters at my house is Boise, ID, moved out, having pretty much trashed the place, and I was uspposed to get married about one week after I started my new job – fun times.

My question is: where did this house suddenly appear? And what about his partner? How did she enter the picture all of a sudden? This surprise in the narrative makes me wonder what other things the author is not mentioning. Such as how did he actually land a $150k work contract at nineteen years old? Who would employ someone of that age in 1999 for $150k? 1 I understand there was the dot-com bubble , but this is still a stretch unless he had some solid connections in the industry. I suspect that he had family or friend connections, which is fine but he doesn’t reveal these connections. The narrative reads as if he made his own way to this point in his life, but there are indicators that he grew up with a silver spoon.

Conclusion

Overall “Soft Skills” is a relatively useful book

  1. I was able to calculate the year that he had this work contract from information he freely gives on his website’s ‘About’ page . On that webpage he writes:

    On February 14th of 2013, … at the age of 33.

    A simple calculation gives his estimated age in 1999 at 19 years old. ↩︎