Upward mobility in any corporate environment involves social interaction. If you expect to just do ‘really good’ work and be automatically promoted all you’ll get is… more work.

I’ll add to the other person who replied:

Most work in this industry is done in teams, if you can’t effectively communicate and get on with your team members, you’re gonna have a bad time.

It’s even baked into the hiring process everywhere I’ve worked, most of the time an organisation would prefer to take a lower skill candidate if they seem like they’d get on well with everyone Vs a highly skilled candidate that would rub people up the wrong way.

It’s a lot easier to fill gaps in engineering ability compared to coaching someone how to behave around people

I’m a software developer and I’m not sure how this is for all companies, and I’m only a year in but I have calls with clients all the time.

Clients will not be able to put into words what they want, it’s on us to get that information from them and read between the lines. You have to be able to converse freely and push back when required.