alt Hacker NewsI'm sorry, but that's nonsense. Soft skills are mostly definitely not about sucking up.
At a previous job, the PM for another team often asked me to join some of their meetings — her engineers were shit at talking to non-technical people, so, for critical meetings, she asked me to join to serve as an interpreter of sorts. That's soft skills at work.
Talking to stakeholders and understanding what they need? Soft skills. Understanding the different between important and urgent? Soft skills. Being able to assess a candidate during an interview? Soft skills. Navigating cultural differences when you have offices or suppliers abroad? Soft skills.
I'd go as far as to say that the single biggest difference between a junior and a senior engineer is how well developed their soft skills are.
Perhaps it's a poor choice of words, what I mean by 'sucking up' refers to understanding the counterparty's mind (and making decisions to close the deal), and it is definitely a part of the game.
Every single thing that you listed requires a understanding of the opposing party that you just talked about in order to make the deal work out. A boss has his/her temper to deal with, her engineers have their own preferences, and that sucks, because as I said the game of soft skills can be a cultural landmine equivalent to rolling a dice with unknown odds.
If that is the only game in town, the result could turn out to be like the USA's politics of today, with no way to deviate/defect if you disagree.