I've been in the financial engineering arena (after BA Math and BA Computer Science) for about 5 years (20% analysis/programming, 80% communicating) and take pride in my ability to communicate with people and discuss technical problems (i.e. interacting with a team).  I love this part of my job.  Going to the white board to draw abstract ideas and brainstorm.  

However, for many reasons, I want to transition my career into a technology company (software engineering) but I'm deeply afraid that I will fall into a stereotypical programming job where programmers code with big headphones on.  I certainly know this is only a stereotype but I've witnessed similar environments before (at startups) and it scares me to think that I would be migrating to a career of isolation. 

I love coding and thinking algorithmically, but I don't want to give up interacting with people. I understand that having communication skills is only a positive, but am I setting myself up for career-happiness failure by transitioning into software engineering.  I'd love to hear any clarifications and/or advice.  

Here's the secret about programming: it is almost 100% communication. A significant part of that is communicating with a human; the rest is communicating what you've just learned to a computer.

The latter part is the easier of the two. Computers do exactly what they're told and you are always in a position to test that what you told it is correct.

The former is something else. Differences in terminologies, in understanding, in priorities, from person to person make it very difficult to get the correct message to feed to the computer. Miscommunications at this level are much more common than miscommunications between a programmer and a computer.

Good programmers are good at communicating with the computer; great programmers are good at communicating with people too, by one medium or another.

Those programmers you see that never come out of their headphones? They're still doing this communication, whether it be via email or a bug-tracker, or even messenger. It's all happening, otherwise they can't possibly know what to tell the computer to do.

So yes, your communication skills will serve you well.
