The Binary Fallacy: Why "Technical vs. Soft Skills" is a Broken Compass

It's funny to look back four years to the moment this cycle began. I was stepping away from my first Tech Lead role and moving with my family to a new continent, a new country: Germany. Before I left, I received the first of many suggestions that would haunt me: "You should apply for Engineering Manager. You’d be great." At the time, with my head already overwhelmed by the logistics of an international move, I dismissed the idea entirely. My sights were set on the technical track.

We arrived in Germany in early 2022. The tech market was still booming, and despite my fear of speaking German and feeling unsettled, I felt compelled to dive back into work. I applied everywhere, specifically targeting Tech Lead and Staff roles. The disappointment was immediate and persistent.

In one exhaustive interview process, my hopes crumbled when the recruiter delivered the feedback: "You didn’t meet the bar for Tech Lead, but interviewers universally said you would be an amazing Engineering Manager." Unfortunately, they had no EM positions open, so they offered a Senior role. I accepted the Senior track, only to receive a final offer for a Mid-Level Software Engineer position. With 12 years of experience, I was outraged. But beneath the ego, my confidence was crushed. The reality was undeniable: something was missing that prevented me from landing a technical leadership title.

I accepted one of several Senior offers and set out to carve my way back up the corporate ladder. Little did I know what was waiting ahead: repeated waves of layoffs, frozen promotions, and bewildered company cultures. I was lucky enough to keep my job while entire teams disappeared, leaving me with a sinking, sour feeling of guilt.

The Insanity Cycle: Why I Believed Soft Skills Were “Less Than”

The ambition to achieve the Staff title became shameful, a private obsession. I kept chasing it, believing I could get the title on my terms. But the story repeated itself: I applied for Staff/Lead roles, was rejected as “not technical enough”, and settled for a Senior role with a good team. I repeated the cycle three times, pursuing the same idea of earning my stripes in a Senior role to prove my worth.

I had hit a wall. What was I truly chasing? Why did I want the title so badly? I sought help through professional coaching and therapy, but even with that support, the core puzzle remained unsolved. 

The suggestion to pursue the Engineering Manager path kept surfacing, from multiple people, on multiple occasions. Part of me felt validated by the recognition of my people skills, but another part felt embarrassed. To me, accepting the EM track meant admitting: I was not technical enough.

I refused the EM role partly because I saw it as the box women are often pushed into, valued only for “social skills”. I pushed back because I wanted to show the world and, more important, to show myself that I could be technical. I realized my subconscious, internalized belief was the real barrier: I valued technical “hard skills” as superior—better, stronger, faster—than people skills.

I was a hypocrite.

I had spent my career advocating that people skills were more important than technical skills within our teams and companies. Yet, deep down, I didn't fully believe it about myself. I was internalizing the very system I spoke against, accepting the narrative that if my hard skills weren't deemed “Staff-worthy”' I didn't deserve a leadership title.

The Sociotechnical Fallacy: Reclaiming My Definition of Engineering

My journey did not end with a massive victory where I finally got the Staff Engineer title. That’s not what this is about. I was still wrestling with this while writing this article. The realization hit me then: the problem wasn't a system pushing me into a mold; it was me believing the system.

I still prefer reading a book on communication to a book on Java. Does this mean I should be an Engineering Manager? Maybe, but I decide no. I want to be in the trenches, solving problems. The difference is acknowledging that there's no such thing as purely “technical” problems versus “people” problems. That division is a fallacy our industry often reinforces.

I have fully reclaimed my own conception of what an Engineer is. I can say, with certainty and without shame, that I am not technical enough by the industry’s standard, and I am okay with that. I will continue nurturing and defending the skills that are often invisible but that everyone agrees make teams better: giving constructive feedback, skillfully disagreeing with direction, and creating psychological safety.

Actionable Takeaways

Operating in the Sociotechnical Gaps

I accept that I don’t really want to be an expert in a single technology, and that's a relief, because it allows me to stop pretending and focus on being a good partner to those who are specialists. I bring sufficient technical knowledge to grasp the complexity, but I choose to apply those skills to the sociotechnical gaps:

• Systemic Integrity (Defense): Protecting the team from process friction, reducing hidden risks, and ensuring robust cross-functional alignment.
• Alignment (Communication): Providing hard, constructive feedback and skillfully disagreeing with the direction to ensure strategic integrity.
• Sustainability (Culture): Building psychological safety and rejecting the 'Hero Narrative' by distributing knowledge and effort.

The industry needs people who are “not technical enough” in technical roles, because modern problems are not black and white; they are nuanced and must be tackled as sociotechnical systems. That is where I thrive.

Reject the Zero-Sum Game

Stop believing that valuing your social impact means devaluing your technical expertise. They are two sides of the same coin in modern engineering. Our industry is obsessed with false dichotomies: you are either a "Deep Specialist" or a "People Manager," "Technical" or "Non-Technical".

This is a Binary Fallacy. We love black-and-white categories because they make hiring rubrics easier to build, but they fail to capture how high-performing teams actually function. As humans, we are unique, and our skills exist on a spectrum. There is no "perfect" balance or one combination that is objectively better than another. There is only the unique impact you bring to the system.

Conclusion: Finding Your North Star

I spent years following a broken compass, I realized I was chasing a definition of Staff that the industry puts in books, ignoring the reality of who gets to pass interviews and promotions. I was letting a title-trap dictate my self-worth. I thought that because I didn't fit the industry's narrow mold of "Staff-level technicality," I was somehow less of an engineer. I was wrong.

This shift in perspective is more relevant now than ever. As we enter the AI era, the "Binary Fallacy" becomes even more dangerous. If we believe that engineering is only about the syntax and the code, we are essentially saying that engineering is a task for machines. But as companies push for AI adoption, the bottlenecks are shifting. AI can generate a POC in seconds, but it cannot navigate the sociotechnical gaps. It cannot negotiate with a Staff Engineer to align on a strategy , it cannot provide the clarity needed to unblock a frustrated team, and it certainly cannot take radical ownership of a process failure to build team trust.

The real work isn't about fitting into a box, it's about identifying the gaps that others can't see and having the courage to fix them. Whether you have the title or not, if you are the translation layer that ensures "good enough" AI generated code has a safe, scalable, and professional place to land, you are performing at the highest level of our craft.

I still don't have the title. But for the first time in 16 years, I’m genuinely okay with that, because real work is getting done. I am still an engineer, happy to be in the trenches every day, because in those trenches, you need all of the skills not just the ones a machine can replicate.