My guess is that it is a good advice for working in smaller companies or cities. I'm in a small city, and we don't have a lot of software development companies

My guess is that it is a good advice for working in smaller companies or cities. I'm in a small city, and we don't have a lot of software development companies here. If anything, most of the programming work is more of a maintaining existing software or projects. There it does feel that social skills are what's important, because you're more of a maintainer. And you're going to be working in a team because knowledge is so spread, and there's very rarely need for things to be done fast or efficient. That being said it is just my feelings and it might not reflect how it looks somewhere else at all.