Something I realized lately is if you don’t ha e soft skills, it literally makes you worse at coding.
I always knew you needed them to be a good employee, but it wasn’t until I worked with a “senior” without an ounce of social grace that I realized lacking soft skills makes you worse at writing good code.
The “senior” didn’t solve the application’s problems because they didn’t care to ask. They thought they knew everything. They didn’t spread their knowledge onto the rest of the team. Instead, they spent their time working on a half-baked idea no one asked for. They would get stuck on a problem and never ask for help, a junior mistake.
My hot take is you need some minimum of social skills (doesn’t have to be a lot!) to be “technically competent.”
I can understand management being hesitant to fire someone technically competent, but this kind of disfunction can tank the productivity of an entire team of otherwise technically competent people, as OP alluded to at the end of their comment.