One of the major assumptions about software engineers is that all we do is write code. This expectation sometimes affects new entrants and professional software engineers as they focused so much on being good at code that they neglected other things like emotional intelligence, interpersonal relationship, and communication skills.
SOFTWARE ENGINEERS TALK TO HUMANS AND MACHINES A LOT
Software engineers have to talk to humans almost as much as we have to talk to machines and this is because we don't build solutions for machines, we build solutions for people, we also work in teams most of the time as such there are a lot of meetings to participate in almost on a daily basis. While we wish some of the meetings are emails, we understand that frequent communication enhances cohesion in the team and reduces the likelihood of doing the unexpected.
CRITICAL ISSUES ARE DELIBERATED BY SOFTWARE ENGINEERS
There are a lot of deliberations involved in building solutions, very critical topics are centered around the features, user experience, and security. The nature of the software solution determines the tradeoffs between security and user experience. You don't expect a banking application to automatically sign you in when you open it, some solutions are built to be difficult to access because some applications (if compromised) can literally ruin the lives of the victims. There is a constant argument about whether a software solution should be made more ergonomic or more secure. How much convenience is too much? How much damage can a thief or hacker do if our client's software solution is compromised? All of these questions are just as important as the features in the solution. To protect user data a lot has to be considered and tweaked before the solution goes into production.