[brucephillips]

Another likely bias is that success is probably measured by peer review, and peers are more likely to overvalue soft skills.

[rifung]

Is there any evidence this is happening? I work at Google and as a lower level engineer more often than not wish some of the leads had better soft skills which makes me think they're not emphasized nearly enough in terms of promotion, which is at least one measure of success.

I believe promotion committees try to see measurable impact, which at least to me sounds like soft skills unfortunately don't help much..