Why soft skills are important for a programmer?

I am curious, why soft skills are so much demanded today on software engineering job market. Aren't programmers engineers?
If they must develop soft skills, why do we need managers and recruiters? They seem to be useless, having soft skills only.
Then they should develop hard skills too, learn at least one programming language (so they would be any much precise in their choices).
Please, explain me, why things are as they are?