200%+ wage uplift for IT folks with social skills (Score 1)

There's such a dearth of talented IT professionals who actually know how to positively interact with others (including other IT professionals), that in my experience there's roughly a 200% salary uplift for people with a combination of IT systems talent and people skills. Of the people I've worked with over my years in IT (going on 6 now), there is a significant percentage I would consider as talented or more talented than I am. However of those people, a minute percentage of those talented people can actually have a positive conversation with their customer. Definition of customer in this case can be a user, IT manager, or literally customer (in the case of vendor relationships). Disputes over the idiotic things customers want to do are the root of the problem. Most IT folks are unable to state why the customer should not do things the way they are currently doing things or plan to do things. Instead they just spout off about how things are wrong. The result is that these people are dismissed ("engineers love to tell you why you can't do something"), and only positive people are listened to at the managerial level. The message that things are being done incorrectly never gets to the level where things can be changed, because those who know don't have the interpersonal skills to make their case to management. The way I approach idiot customers is to state how they plan to do it, and explain that it is a valid way of doing things, then explain the alternatives, and which risks the alternatives eliminate. This simple process has netted me 2-3x the income of other similarly (technically) skilled people I've known over the years. Those who cannot approach their customers with respect (if not humility) are destined to never work directly with them, and never to have an influence over the truly meaningful things they work on.