Soft Skills

Concept · Chapter 15

Soft skills are the interpersonal, hard-to-measure abilities that complement an architect’s technical (hard) skills.

Hard skills vs. soft skills

	Hard skills	Soft skills
Nature	Concrete, measurable, job-specific	Intangible, hard to define/measure, interpersonal
How acquired	Education, training, certifications	More innate, but improvable via training
Examples	A programming language, a framework	Leadership, communication, listening, empathy, negotiation, patience

Being an architect is more than technical knowledge — effectiveness depends on interpersonal ability.
The importance of soft skills rises as you move from a developer role into architecture.
They can be strengthened deliberately; it is worth investing time to improve them.