Hired for Your Hard Skills, Fired for Your Soft Skills

I wrote this post in Spanish in 2022 and adapted it to English in 2026.

What the title of this post says may sound like nonsense, or it may sound obvious... but it's something a lot of people don't take into account.

From my experience at work, I've noticed there are mainly two kinds of juniors.

On one side, there's the junior who thinks they have nothing to say, nothing to contribute, and stays quiet in every meeting.

On the other side, there's the junior who thinks they're the smartest person in the world, who knows everything, who's above their coworkers, and who should already be promoted to senior and made team lead because they've got it all figured out.

Both of them have a junior profile, because neither one accounts for the reach of their abilities or the limits of their knowledge.

So what's this all about?

Your First Job as a Developer #

If you've mastered this or that technology (say you're very good at Python, you know Mongo, Docker and SQL), well, you probably landed a junior data analyst or data engineer job.

At this point... careful, I think by now it's obvious that if you're reading this post, you probably have a junior or mid-level profile, because believe me, when you're senior it's because you know things.

Your soft skills are super polished, so you don't make mistakes like the ones I'm describing, in the sense that you're already aware of your abilities and have a sense of how much an idea you share can contribute.

So, back to the point: you got the job! You're doing the work, and they hired you for those... let's call them hard skills.

However, if your attitude is that you don't contribute because you don't know enough, you don't propose anything and you're not there when they need you... or your attitude is that you know it all and you have a problem with authority, with your team lead, and so on...

In both cases, what's failing are your soft skills.

In the first case because you're underestimating yourself, and in the second because you're overestimating yourself. The only difference between those two kinds of people is that the second one gets fired faster because they're more annoying, and the first one, in the long run (if they don't change their attitude), ends up getting fired too.

Because, let's face it, who wants someone on their team who doesn't contribute, who just stays quiet and, well, only does their job?

Maybe some companies are fine with a profile like that, but most aren't. Most want sharks. Most want the best possible employee for the salary they can afford to pay.

If everyone could hire those rock stars who work at the five biggest companies in the world and make more than a million dollars a year, I promise you companies would only hire people with that profile.

What Profile Do Companies Look For, and How Do You Keep Your First Job? #

They want to hire the best possible profile for the salaries they can afford to pay right now, and if you want to keep a job and grow inside that company, it's your soft skills that will take you further.

You can read more about this in this post I wrote about how to grow and become senior as fast as possible.

As you can read in that post, the second pillar most promotions at any company are built on is soft skills.

Among them: your leadership, decision-making, ability to summarize, to deliver reports, to analyze and all that. All of those are soft skills that have nothing to do with your technical knowledge.

Technical knowledge is something you can eventually polish, or the company can simply hire someone who already has it.

But decision-making...

That's something nobody teaches you. It's something you have to polish on your own, dealing with your anxieties, impostor syndrome and... I can't remember what this post was about. What was it about? Oh right, soft skills!

So there you go: technical knowledge will get you that first job, but soft skills are what keep you there. And if you want to grow inside a company, it's your communication, conflict resolution and the rest of those skills that will keep you in a healthy work environment.

I have nothing more to say, or maybe I do, but this post is getting way too long, and if I go on any longer not even TWO people will want to read it. So, until next time!