A QJE paper finds the labor market increasingly rewards social skills. Between 1980 and 2012, jobs requiring high social interaction grew by ~12 percentage points as a share of US labor. Math-intensive less social jobs—fell by 3.3 percentage points: https://t.co/ltwC6U3zr5

— Kweku Opoku-Agyemang, Ph.D (@KwekuOA) June 5, 2023

True. I am in a highly technical role and not in sales support or sales engineering, yet I have meetings with non-technical client teams 2-3 times a week.

Many people who are in my field cannot be put in front of clients due to their poor social skills and lack of ability to explain technical ideas and concepts to those in less-technical roles. One of the reasons companies have to hire 2-3 (or more) people to replace me when I depart is that I can be schmoozing with clients one day, putting them at ease, and setting up BGP failover the next.

In my field that is very fucking rare. I know it, those above me know it, and clients know it. That’s why I get p-p-paid.