Ask HN: Are there dev conferences focusing on "soft skills"?
4 theletterf 6 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?
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.
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.
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.
https://leaddev.com/staffplus-new-york/