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The savant/nerd engineer with poor social skills is a troupe which does exist, but so is the manager who washed out of the developer track because they couldn't keep up on the technical side, and they're not a better manager than they were a developer but those failures are harder to quantify.

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I think even that "poor social skills nerd" engineer trope might be partially an example of Berkson's Paradox [1]. You have to have serious technical chops to compensate for a lack of social skills, and it's hard to see all of the people with weak social skills who aren't engineers.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkson%27s_paradox

edit: removing markdown syntax

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