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

4 theletterf 7 6/14/2025, 1:37:04 PM

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?

Comments (7)

zippyman55 · 22h ago

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.

kingkongjaffa · 21h ago

I’ve tried several different chapters of toastmasters and they always feel very cliquey.

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 · 18h ago

I understand the cliquey comment! Usually there are several clubs in the area and you have to find one that resonated with you. And I always had trouble with the few that wanted to devote their lives to toastmasters. But if you find the right club and spend a year, you can get rewarded. And if you try to become a club level position, you do develop those soft skills needed to deal w difficult and crazy people, just like work. I think developing ones soft and executive skills is a long process and many things need to be tried.

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 · 17h ago

they always feel very cliquey

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.

theletterf · 22h ago

Oh, I know Toastmasters (I was in a local chapter at work many years ago). For me the point is bringing some of that to mainstream tech conferences. Otherwise, it ends up feeling insular.

throwaway019254 · 19h ago

Check out the StaffPlus conference:

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

aaron695 · 21h ago

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.