Hard skills and Soft skills

The hard skills refer to technical skills. The soft skills are your communication skills, and your ability to work with other people, and your ability to persevere through hardship. Both are important for your interview and your job.

3 types of person

Pre-condition is every type of person meets the bar to succeed in an interview

• Well balanced - Pretty strong hard skills and pretty strong soft skills
• Strong technically and just a little bit weaker on the soft skills
• Exceptional in soft skills and then just a little bit weaker in technical skills

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Why Soft Skills?

From Wikipedia, the definition of soft skills are like below.

Soft skills include critical thinking, problem solving, public speaking, professional writing, teamwork, digital literacy, leadership, professional attitude, work ethic, career management and intercultural fluency.

No doubt these skills are important to not only a software engineer not also other professionals.

Another definition from Joseph et al. Practical Intelligence in IT: Assessing Soft Skills of IT Professionals. Communications of the ACM, 2010 is

We formally define the practical intelligence of IT Professionals as the managerial, intrapersonal, and interpersonal skills that are used to resolve IT-related work problems.

Intrapersonal means, willingness to learn new things and perseverance in the face of challenges .

A common mistake due to lack of soft skills is diving into the code before discussing the problem and its proposed solution with the interviewer even if an interviewer gives off the hint. Don't focus on missing a hint. Recognize that communication with your teammates is an essential job skill.

The other example is if you know the answer to the question but you are not confident to say the answer. It may be that your technical knowledge is weak and you're guessing. Conveying your understanding very well is also essential.