I worked at an HFT firm and initially they were focusing on hiring people like MIT grads and programming competition winners. But eventually they realized their social skills were often not the best and went for a more well-rounded candidate.

I worked at another firm in the finance space that hired a PhD with poor social skills who had to be let go because he would try to aggressively “checkmate” other people by proving them wrong and say that they were dumb. It got so bad that other people refused to be in meetings with him.