[s73ver_]

"Soft skills are vital for team lead and product management but being able to write a good email and butter up your superiors isn't too important for other developers."

Unless you're a developer that works by themself on code that will never be used directly by other people, soft skills are always vital. Soft skills include things like being able to empathize with others, which is quite important for building usable interfaces. And, soft skills are incredibly important for getting along with others, which, as a developer, you're going to have to do.

[crdoconnor]

>Soft skills include things like being able to empathize with others, which is quite important for building usable interfaces

And, as with leaving product management to the professional product managers, it is usually better to leave the designing of UIs to the professional designers.

>And, soft skills are incredibly important for getting along with others

Not having good soft skills is not the same thing as having a toxic personality.

I've known many developers who rarely talked, rarely spoke up during meetings and just quietly got on with their job - building code to spec - and did it really well. They were, sadly, always highly underrated as developers and judging by what I've read in this thread, this is a prejudice that isn't likely to disappear any time soon.

[tbrownaw]

And, as with leaving product management to the professional product managers, it is usually better to leave the designing of UIs to the professional designers.

If your company has those, sure.

[s73ver_]

They're not underrated; they're rated where they belong.