I would hire people with good aptitude and attitude over people with good technical chops any day of the week. It's not even close. I've seen too many teams of great people walk into a project not knowing any of the tech involved -- and kick ass. I've also seen a tremendous number of highly-skilled teams create a death march/miserable existence for themselves where they could get nothing done at all.
What do you mean by soft skills? Soft skills for a manager might be an agreeable developer, who agrees to unreasonable deadlines. The manager would would say he had a good positive attitude, but the project would certainly fail.
Soft Skills from the development teams perspective is assertiveness. The ability to say no(in a nice way) to an unreasonable request, without some kind of compromise on timeline or scope. A manager might say that guy is unreasonable, stubborn or manipulative(if you say no diplomatically). However the project has a higher chance of succeeding towards realistic goals.
Point being soft skills means different things to different people.
> Soft Skills from the development teams perspective is assertiveness.
It's also "not being a dick to your fellow team members". One asshole can poison an entire team's culture. Besides, if you're doing Scrum remotely close to how it was intended, the only person who needs to be able to tell the product owner to fuck off nicely is the scrum master.
