[adriand]

Of course you want to work with people who are "pleasant" and "friendly" but these are not synonyms for "charismatic", defined as having "special magnetic charm or appeal". [1]

Would you disagree that software development, as a profession, tends to have fewer charismatic people in it than other fields in which charisma is more valuable and/or essential? For instance, if I were to suggest that the average successful politician is more charismatic than the average successful software engineer, would you disagree with that statement?

If we think about it in purely economic terms, I'd suggest that people who are very good at getting other people to do things (i.e. they have charisma) have a powerful incentive to enter careers where they can leverage that special ability.

1: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/charisma

[evantbyrne]

Maybe charisma is the wrong term. I've found pleasantness and willingness to communicate to be strongly correlated with engineering ability amongst those in the profession. Likewise, the worst engineers I've worked with all had major anti-social personality issues. The profession has always involved soft skills in my experience. When I've hired people I designed small tasks similar to the actual day-to-day work they would be doing, and that filtered out candidates who lacked coding ability quite easily.