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Ask HN: Are there dev conferences focusing on "soft skills"?

by theletterf on 6/14/25, 1:37 PM with 8 comments

At a glance, most developer conferences seem focused on boasting about minutiae and implementation details ("I've done X", "Lessons learned from fixing Z", and so on). While those are fun to attend and are indeed relevant to a stack, framework, platform, or language, they often restrict the human side of software development to fun marginalia.

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?

  • by zippyman55 on 6/14/25, 2:08 PM

    May I suggest finding a local chapter of the public speaking group: Toastmasters.org? The different clubs will have different personalities. So you may need to check out a few. The basic concept is you will eventually perform ten speeches and develop your communication skills and get feedback along the way. You can also sign up for an officer position and develop your skills in that area. You may also want to compare soft skills with executive skills. Both are important. For fun, my wife and ai enrolled in a Fred Pryor online program. $99/yr and it was an all you can eat buffet of soft skills classes. A weeklong conference in soft skills may scratch an itch but not go deep enough with “homework problems” to really develop you.

  • by ensemblehq on 6/16/25, 1:36 PM

    I was actually thinking of setting up some coaching sessions / workshops. If you're interested, I'd love to connect with you just to get a understanding of folks would be looking for and put together a program of some sort. In exchange, I'd be happy to share my experiences and exchange ideas on improving soft skills.

    I've worked as a software engineer and as a consultant and went from engineering to business back to engineering again.

  • by throwaway019254 on 6/14/25, 5:09 PM

    Check out the StaffPlus conference:

    https://leaddev.com/staffplus-new-york/

  • by aaron695 on 6/14/25, 3:00 PM

    DEI means this is the filler in all the less than specialized IT conferences I've been to lately.

    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.