Personally, I think that most programmers aren't friendly simply because their logical part of the brain is more developed than their emotional part.
IQ vs. EQ.
That said - I believe that I myself haven't that low of an EQ, but I often lack the patience and often get a bit too high headed to be as nice as possible.
Often, when I talk with my gf about how I handled different situations - she's like: 'Are serious? Why did you do that? You should have been more patient / nicer / etc. '.
And I'm like - 'Hä? Why? I was already nice but honest'
So - with that in mind - I rather have somebody else manage customer or user-support because while I can do it - I'm def. not the best at it.. :'D
Still having an high IQ is never an excuse for a low EQ, basically the higher the IQ the higher should be the ability to comprehend how important the EQ is =D
You can say that but almost everyone I know that would be in the "high IQ" area has difficulty communicating because people whom tend to have a higher IQ communicate in a different way from people with lower IQ's or whom specialize in different areas. For instance, as I programmer I tend to look at things as problems to solve whereas my friend in engineering looks at things completely differently and because of this we almost always have problems when comprehending the other, not because we aren't smart but because we are, just in different ways. And don't even get me started on communication differences between someone in the STEM field compared to someone in the Arts
For sure, there will always be differences of communication, nevertheless, independently of the area, there should always be a layer of respect.
Definitely, respect is a major thing though, and I hate to say this this way, sometimes people can come across as condescending in tone or sentence structure when they do not mean to be which can muddy the interpretation of respect. This is a really big problem with communication is that there are so many ways to do it, in my opinion and experience.