No question. Yet, social connection seems worth 10x or 100x competence in any particular circumstance and the effects compound. There are some real benefits from and needs to be prosocial and socially competent but I've regularly seen social competent but technically incompetent people advance far over technically competent but less socially agenda driving people (that are nonetheless socially competent). This only gets worse at scale and as you progress.

I love coding and do it reliably well with joy but as my career has progressed I've struggled more and more with getting a company to let me work at a "low level" or to navigating what seem like sociopathic behaviors to really contribute at my capacity.

Reality is that the ones quietly holed up in the corner are usually doing all the unsexy maintenance-type work that the extroverts don't want to do (because it's not sexy).

Nobody cares about that work... until it doesn't get done. And so, nobody doing it gets promoted.

If it was all about impact then ppl wouldn't be paying thousands of dollars to learn to play golf with their bosses. But you knew that already.

Well put. I'm an introvert, I can't do math, I won't travel, etc. are all things that some people claim as if it's the unchangeable nature of things. If that's their chosen path, so be it. But they should understand it will probably be pretty limiting because the world they live in.

> But you can only add so much value to an organization typing on a keyboard.

In my understanding, non-junior software development jobs never were about typing on the keyboard. Senior software engineer is a fancy name for a problem solver, and code is just a specialized tool they can build to possibly achieve the goal. It always was about talking to stakeholders, figuring out what the heck they actually want today, how it fits with what they think they want tomorrow, learning more about those stakeholders so you can guess what they will think they want next week. Only then it's thinking about it all it for a while, and only after that it's getting to press the actual buttons.

But I'm not sure those things require "soft skills" aka - in my understanding - being a people person. For me, it was a very simple learning process - I (as a junior) coded something, a manager came next month and said I have to rewrite everything again because things have changed. I hated it, so I started to think how to possibly avoid or minimize it and optimize my own processes.

And in my mental model, it's not about people (save for tiny companies where a whole department/role is a single person, so I have to account for their mental chaos monkeys), it's all about business. That's why I wrote "stakeholders", intentionally dehumanizing (with no negative connotations) the model.