Learning about personality traits and how to connect with different types of people, can be very useful in becoming better at communicating with others on a tea

Learning about personality traits and how to connect with different types of people, can be very useful in becoming better at communicating with others on a team, your boss, different types of managers in different roles, etc. Learning sales strategies and principles is way more useful than it sounds like it would be. Engineers don't want to hear this, but all individual contributors have to sell, at one time or another: you sell your ideas and approaches to solving problems (so the boss/team will understand and agree to your ideas), because you want the right thing to happen with the project you're working on. You sell yourself when interviewing for jobs. Sales techniques even help with dating, to help you understand what wrong things people sometimes say, and how to say things in better ways that have the same meaning. Learning more about selling would have come in very handy earlier in my sw dev career. It also sets you up better if you ever decide to branch out on your own and start a business of any kind. Selling has a lot of technical details to it, more than you would think. It's not just simple and 1-dimensional and thus ignorable, like I imagined when I was getting my CS degree so long ago.