[Dirak]

Tangential, but I think strong social skills are very important if you want to improve as a software engineer. Examples of strong social skill would be being able to set project direction, set up cross team collaborations, communicate impact, mentor and grow your colleagues, etc. Exclusively having strong technical skills can lead you down the "evil genius" archetype, where you're able to deliver technically complex software, but in a way that alienates contributors and collaborates (ie Haskell elitists).

[_8j50]

I think you are mixing soft skills with social skills. To me, social means you are good at chit-chat,watercooler talk, going to lunches, parties, events,etc... i.e.: a social person is what oldschool hr people mean when they say "can I strike a conversation with this person in a line at the airport or starbucks".

What you are talking about imo is "soft skills", being able to work with others and communicate well. You can have great softskills and also have terrible table manner or bad emotional-intelligence.

I am 100% with you on technical-skills only being a bad thing. But you can communicate and do all those things you mentioned virtually. You can ping someone and just chat with them about stuff without taking them to lunch, dinner or walking up to their cubicle/desk and interrupting them.

Look at open work areas for example, even before covid, I and many others were screaming in pain over them. Out brains are just wired different. Extroverts tend to become managers and founders and refuse to consider that others think and function differently.

Look at most opensource projects, did people sit around in an office to code them? Was there a Linux kernel developers office somewhere? Then paulg's point is invalid.