Talking is a skill and that really stands out against other candidates.
When I’m interviewing, I’ll usually choose a stronger communicator over a stronger engineer.
Ultimately, most of the time I 'talk' with my team members, we're actually writing which is very different from talking due to the async nature of the former.
These are basically "brilliant jerks" on the soft skill side. They take so much of the space that the people who knows anything don't get much airtime. But if the soft brilliant jerk would just stop talking for a bit the other people would start talking and actually improve communication in the team.
IMO engineering orgs tend to set the bar really high for tech skills and really low for communication skills. Tech skills are easier to test and they feel more "objective" so they get more focus.
Remember that most of us that are self-taught are pretty good at being person #1 on a one person project. That's what self-teaching teaches us, after all. But, a successful business might not be possible built around one programmer, so as you progress in your career you'll be working on developing the skills to form a cohesive team around you. A lot of this is going to be talking to people, not memorizing some algorithm. (But, many jobs are going to require both, so don't forget all the algorithms while you're in those meetings. At least brush up on them before your interview. A day of prep here can equal hundreds of thousands of dollars over the course of your career.)
This hold true as pretty much every level. A junior engineer who will never say "No, I don't understand, can you explain that to me again please?" and spends days/weeks writing code that doesn't meet a requirement is less productive than someone who'll talk to you to understand properly before starting to code. A senior engineer or technical cofounder who can't communicate well with customers will be much less effective in solving real customer problems or finding product/market fit.
Being a great engineer isn't just about writing good code, its about writing the right code - and to know what that is you need good communication skills.
Asking for help is more about humility and willingness to look dumb, than about being gregarious or chatty or socially open.
A) the most important indicators of likely success on the team B) very correlated with comfort in speaking
If I can't get you to talk at all when you're uncomfortable, you're unlikely to tell me you don't understand in the often uncomfortable iterating on a feature process.
It's possible to be gregarious AND be unable to ever admit that you lack critical information, which is why interviews, for me, are mostly about asking questions until we get to the point you don't know/don't understand, and see how you work with me from there on.
What a lot of people who get stressed about interviews don't realize, though, is that WHERE PRECISELY you reach your limits is unimportant. It's that you engage thoughtfully, without getting overly defensive, and don't bullshit. Not about whether you got the right answer at any given spot.
If you don't, that's a sign the engineering culture needs some TLC. And now that I think of it, in that case good communication may still be a priority factor.
The worst were the ones where the interviewer clearly didn’t want to be there and mostly acted as a cold stone statue firing questions of from a sheet of paper. Incidentally those interviews were usually also the ones with the highest number of hackerrank sorts of questions.