Silicon Valley culture encourages it. Google calls engineers who aren’t managers “individual contributors.” Technical skills are valued above soft skills or business skills. “Anyone who deals with a human being is considered less intelligent,” said Ellen Ullman, a software programmer and author of a new book, “Life in Code.” “You would think it would be the other way around, but the more your work is just talking to the machine, the more valuable it is.”

Image Google Glass, worn in 2013 by Sergey Brin of Google, was a technical feat but landed flat with consumers. Credit... Robert Galbraith/Reuters

One example is the distinction between front-end engineers, who build the parts of a product that users interact with, and back-end engineers, who work on behind-the-scenes systems, like data storage or scaling. There is a bias that front-end engineering, which generally pays less and has more women, is less technically difficult. People who have done both say the skills are different, but equally challenging and valuable.

Problems arise when engineers get to a point in their careers when they’re required to demonstrate social skills, Mr. Zunger said, like understanding diverse points of view, building consensus and reading people’s subtle cues. “Suddenly they’re told that these skills that are their weak point might be really important,” he said. “Their own value is in question.”

In the tech industry, the lack of interpersonal skills has become a weakness and a liability.

Edmond Lau runs an engineering coaching business with many clients like Google and Facebook called The Effective Engineer. His work can sound like touchy-feely therapy sessions.

For example, he said, a senior engineer spots a bug and fixes the code, trying to be helpful. But the person who wrote it thinks the person overstepped onto his territory, or was sending a passive-aggressive message. At Quip, a workplace productivity company where Mr. Lau is an engineering leader, he leads circles in which engineers talk about how to work together or ask for help.

“You might have ideas in your head, but unless you communicate them, no one’s going to understand,” he said.

Technical skills without empathy have resulted in products that have bombed in the market, because a vital step to building a product is the ability to imagine how someone else might think and feel. “The failure rate in software development is enormous, but it almost never means the code doesn’t work,” Mr. Ensmenger said. “It doesn’t solve the problem that actually exists, or it imagines a user completely different from actual users.”