I may have misread your comment, but I don't think soft skills are a 'narrow thing' at all. Effective communication, building trust, bringing people along with you - these are fundamental to being an effective human, not some niche pivot.
Not fair on you. I did not mean to have a dig. I get where you are coming from, and should have elaborated. I've worked with those one or two engineers who were rude by default. Who had an extraordinary knack of vaguely describing the problem set, and then having a full on meltdown, always in front of other people, when the solutions did not match the problem in their head.*
*Goldman Sachs(sorry for invoking that name here) did a report on their high turnover, and the above framing was why many quit.
Look, if we zoom in, then "learning to code" is also quite a broad range of skills that someone needs to master before they can meaningfully carve out a career in a competitive marketplace.
The point is that if you zoom out, it's just a thin slice that can be automated by machines. People keep saying "I'll tell you in my experience, no UAV will ever trump a pilot's instinct, his insight, the ability to look into a situation beyond the obvious and discern the outcome, or a pilot's judgment"... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZygApeuBZdk
But as you can see, they're all wrong. By narrow here I meant a thin layer that thinks it's indispensable as they remove all the other layers. Until the system comes for this layer too.
