Exactly. It doesn't matter how smart or talented you are if you have no soft skills. You can't treat employees as black boxes where business needs go in and business value comes out. Soft skills are the vehicle through which someone interfaces with the company, which is ultimately "just a bunch of people".
You can isolate folks without soft skills to some extent to avoid them butting heads with other people, but at some point they still need to be able to take direction and work with some people.
Softness has not produced anything worth discussion. We're falling over ourselves trying not to hurt each other's feelings as economic dispossession drives the masses closer to killing each other for a portion of rice. It's perverse.
Every iconic output of the past was mercilessly whipped into production by a Torvalds, a Romero, or a Ballmer. Assholes that people hate to work with, yet have just enough soft skills that people put up with them despite it (God knows it's why my wife stays with me).
The death of meritocracy turns every industry into a crab bucket of mediocrity. The weak gang up on the strong and ensure we'll never see another Doom or Linux again, only overvalued middleware (commoditized digital bureaucracy, so sexy) and Chinese shovelware about flightless birds.
There are assholes, and then there are dysfunctional assholes. Modern therapy fails everyone here too, by opting for softness and affirmation instead of just telling people nobody likes them because they're too much of an asshole and they need to figure their shit out. Jart has always struck me as someone with an undiagnosed personality disorder that I'm going to get yelled at for even suggesting, which should say a lot about what outcome they wish to see. This is how systems fail brilliant people enough to fall through the cracks. We're not allowed to say anything until they commit suicide, and then it's "just a shame." I've only ever seen such deliberate dysfunction within female social circles.
Terry Davis wrote an entire operating system despite being a homeless, elder abusing, schizophrenic racist. The transphobic Nazis at Kiwi Farms write a game for it every year just to celebrate his memory and achievement and prove his architecture sound. We are told these are the worst people on the planet, yet they uplift the fringe characters of society and push the boundaries of experience-- the spirit that used to belong to hackers.
But today's "hackers" are a cult of HR, while demented racists with no patience for their lies, abuse and orthodoxy get to have all the fun beyond the wall. No wonder leftists hate them. You people are about as fun as Jehovah's Witnesses.
Jart might as well create a KF account. She'd be well-received by the terrible transphobes who'd appreciate her technical chops.
You can isolate folks without soft skills to some extent to avoid them butting heads with other people, but at some point they still need to be able to take direction and work with some people.