The people who graduated with me, but put all their "skill points" into Charisma instead of Technical Mastery, are all Directors, VPs, very high level people right now, running their show. Some switched careers into investment banking or consulting and are now set for life. I'm still sitting here after 25 years and an advanced degree, chugging along as a mid-level individual contributor, no budget, not even a single direct report, let alone a tree of engineers under me. It doesn't seem fair, but it is the way it is. I gambled that "knowing what I'm doing" was enough and lost.
If I had to give advice to a 20 year old getting ready to graduate from university and go into engineering, it would be: Learn how to dress well, how to smile, how to engage with small talk, how to exaggerate in ways that you can plausibly defend later, how to figure out what someone wants to hear and tell it back to them in a way that makes you look good, how to take something you did and explain it in a way that makes you look like a much bigger contributor than you were. These are the actual skills you need in the modern workforce.