[Arch-TK]

Being able to work with another skilled programmer (be that yourself in the future or someone you're working on a kernel with) is not the same kind of skillset as being able to talk to an end user about what the pain points are in their day to day work and trying to actually sympathise with them and understand what problems they're encountering without making the rookie mistake of taking everything the user said at face value and designing a system around it.

These are disparate skillsets and both of them are difficult to master. Claiming one is harder than the other is really quite shallow. Some people are going to naturally have an easier time picking up one skillset while other will have a naturally easier time picking up the other skillset. I think rather than trying to pretend like people should stop focusing on hard skills and start focusing on soft skills, we could realise for a moment that it does nobody any good to take people who are good at one task and insist that they must retrain for another when there are already plenty of people who are good at the other task.

It would make more sense to get these groups of people to learn just enough of the opposite person's skillset so that they can effectively communicate and as a result form a well functioning two-sided system where one group of people talks to users and analyses their requirements and the other group of people actually works off of these more concrete better defined requirements to actually implement the software.

If you think that "soft skills" are harder than "hard skills" it's probably because they're harder for you, that doesn't mean they're harder for everyone, and instead of pretending like this is some kind of major flaw in your own professional development, you could treat it as a gap which could be filled by people who have the opposite view of difficulty.