Hacker News Reader

In my experience, yes.

As to why, people like working with people who are like them.

Assuming that the development part is good enough, having people skills blows that person away.

I learned my skills from various sources, but I found a coach that took me to the next level. His name is Marcus Oakey. I'm sure he is still teaching.

Yes. In my freelancing life, I met plenty of people where we both agreed I was the better coder by far, but the other charged a higher rate. My people skills are pretty good, for engineer standards. But theirs were better :-)

Good software development is about people skills. No matter how good a coder you are, you can't possibly deliver what the client wants if you don't understand the problem.