I've hired over 40 engineers in the past decade, and I can tell you that technical skill gets you the interview, but soft skills like communication and teamwork decide if you keep the job. We once passed on a brilliant coder because he couldn't explain his design decisions without condescension, and later hired a less technically sharp candidate who lifted the whole team's morale. Yet many companies still list '5+ years in X language' as a hard requirement while treating emotional intelligence as a nice-to-have. That seems backwards when most projects fail due to miscommunication, not bad code. Is it fair to say that soft skills are actually more critical than hard skills for long-term career success, or do hard skills still deserve the priority they get in most job descriptions?