Good article overall. Quite often we are caught in our own dilemma and risk being toxic. My only criticism of the article will be not mentioning the risks of being "too empathic" and absorbing other people's problems into yourself. You should not only be able to get into their shoes, but also get out of there too and do it relatively quickly. Otherwise, you cannot survive as a leader of many and will be quickly crushed emotionally.

I think the author confuses simple likability for charisma. Charismatic people generally have a lot of likability, but not all likable people are charismatic.

Charismatic people aren't just able to get people to like them, they are able to persuade people to adopt their viewpoint. When someone charismatic wants X to happen, you find yourself also wanting X to happen.

This distinction matters, because the easy path to likability is agreeability: simply do what the people around you want you to do. They'll all like you, which is definitely valuable. But it won't necessarily get you closer to your goals.

Charisma, which is a quite rare trait, has a special balance of likeability and dis-agreeability, where people will get on board with your plan and feel good doing it. It's the ability to increase their agreeability.

correct but pedantic. would you say you satisfy the author's intent of demonstrating this skill? (whichever it is, likability or charisma)

i would actually argue that your definition of charismatic tends towards manipulative. i don't think that's what you really meant.

The kids would say aura

Its an important skill for corporate engineers that want to ladder climb. I think this over focus lately on communication in engineering is making work suck more. This is how politic players dominate and technical work doesn't matter as much as how you sell impact, real or not. We're all stuck playing their game. Engineers get stuck with poorly made decisions made by peoples who feelings cant get hurt, the things we build start to suck. Like a code review you have to hold back on because you can't leave to many comments tearing it apart without coming off like a dick.

Only sub par engineers need to constantly be politely told they suck and have to sugar coat everything for them. Good engineers come up with good ideas, at least good at a foundational level, where you can discuss the pros and cons. If an idea has some legitimate merit but a drawback you don't think is worth it, then the criticisms are real and honest, no ones feelings are getting hurt.

This is a pretty idealistic and unrealistic take on human behavior. I realize a lot of software types like to pooh-pooh soft skills and think that the ideal is that people can always be Perfect Rational Beings. But this is not how actual humans operate, not even software people.

It's one thing to use a software career to explore the things that give you joy. Building software is fun. But it's another thing to use it to run away from things you're intimidated by, like interacting with other people or empathizing with them. "I got into software so I wouldn't have to deal with people" is a joke, but it's not really a realistic way of approaching the world beyond the very junior level.

You can either rant about how people should be or meet them as they actually are.

You didn't really address the value of charisma. You just vented against ladder climbing corporate engineers and insinuated you are mean in code reviews.

Charisma isn't lying or being sensitive, so you aren't opposed to it.

There's a whole section in this article called "Motivation" which tries to highlight the importance of soft skills in general for engineers. It doesn't begin with just charisma. Charsmia is just one part of the soft skills overview this series is going over it looks like

Which is still valuable to some extent.

I hate to break it to you, but you get to write software because you work for a company that needs to generate revenue in order to pay your salary, pay the bills, and give a dividend to its shareholders. That is why "corpo MBA" people exist.

Inconveniently for some software types, the world doesn't and shouldn't revolve around software development.

And people wonder why I believe software dev has fallen off a cliff.

This is why; and AI, which I see more as a side effect.