Very often in my experience, people with too many soft skills and too little hard skills are at best dead weights, at worst con men, which are a special kind of asshole you REALLY don't want to deal with.

Of course the best is to have both hard/soft skills, which is not as rare as people assume.

>Very often in my experience, people with too many soft skills and too little hard skills are at best dead weights, at worst con men

No, these are the people who should be moved into management positions. They can spend time on all the soft-skill stuff that ICs don't want to spend time on, like dealing with upper management, leading meetings, etc. They don't need to have the best hard skills, just enough to understand at a higher level and communicate with others in and out of the organization, and they can refer to the experts in their teams when they need more detail.

I completely disagree. Managers who don't have knowledge can do way too much damage.

Hard disagree. I've yet to see a "brilliant asshole" with anywhere near the kind results I expect from my teams. The usual pattern is your typical asshole will ship broken stuff and then blame everyone else for the breakages.

Now, average assholes who self-promote as brilliant and hope no one will see through their crap, sure, plenty of those. I'd recommend against failing to see through their crap, though. They'll make your actually good engineers leave.

Maybe you had those average assholes masquerading as brilliant? I don't know that of course, but "ships broken stuff" doesn't sound particularly brilliant to me.

I'm thinking of the type that builds things that you can stack up against the output of others and comes out miles ahead. I have one of those in my team, and it feels like a force of nature: he independently does in a month what a team of five did in three, and his work is of better quality. Of course I'll cut him a lot more slack.