Do you know of a developer conference that covers key skills such as communication, teamwork, and personal growth, even as the main track? Or those are all considered to be orthogonal to shipping code and thus less valuable, important, or interesting?
Have you looked?
It is low quality because they are quota-ed talks, but there is a lot of it.
How to work with divergents, leadership, interviews, coming back from break downs, a million 'imposter syndromes'.
Getting past Imposter Syndrome with ChatGPT.... most useless talk ever. I could spin that in a pretty cool way, it's just fooling people, they could barely use it.
> Or those are all considered to be orthogonal
There is a whole scam industry around 'motivational' talks, if someone can ship code that's proof of life. I suspect half the reason Agile was invented was to boot the scammers out.
It's good to learn 'communication, teamwork, and personal growth', there is a base level that needs to be taught.
I've worked as a software engineer and as a consultant and went from engineering to business back to engineering again.
zippyman55•7mo ago
theletterf•7mo ago
kingkongjaffa•7mo ago
There’s usually a core group who are already awesome at public speaking and I found it really off putting.
Maybe it is because I’m in the UK but I sensed many use the club as a place for socializing rather than for public speaking. Last time I went people were more excited about staying for drinks after the session finished. Not sure it works for everyone.
zippyman55•7mo ago
One other item: track down an executive level negotiation course. Our local library had one, it was excellent. A lot of soft skill development is figuring out what potholes in the road you are driving on need to be filled.
brudgers•7mo ago
Dealing with "cliquey" is a soft skill...and "soft skills for developers" is cliquey too.
I am not saying Toastmasters is for you, but learning usually feels uncomfortable and indeed feeling out of your comfort zone is one symptom of learning.
More directly, Toastmasters takes public speaking seriously. That's a feature not a bug. Like any community, it filters out people who don't share that value.