[The_Colonel]

That's an interesting experience. I agree that this advice is probably more valuable to people who are already quite senior technically. Before that, it might be better to simply focus on sharping your technical skills. Reflecting on my experiences, I remember junior-ish people who chose to focus on communication rather than technical skills - without being able to back their communication with hard skills, they seem to kind of drift toward scrum master / project manager role.

But once in a senior position, a person should start thinking "larger" than just their own code, especially if they want to further advance.

> but until then collaboration needs to take up a minority of my time.

For sure. I would say from Staff position upwards, the collaboration aspect might take a larger chunk than pure engineering.

All this is of course very organization specific.