The ability to collaborate across teams and orgs is critical to success. Gone are the days of holing up in your silo. Leadership teams want to see more collaboration from senior devs.
I am a manager/engineer for one of the largest tech companies. Skills I am often asked to interview for are often in the direction of teamwork and relationship building. Promotion criteria are also strongly aligned in this direction. The ability of someone to get anything significant done sitting alone with their headphones on at a scale like this is practically nil.
I think with generative AI things will continue to move in this direction. Hands on code time will continue to shrink, time talking to people will continue to increase.
Personally I love to code, I love quiet time, I love getting into a flow. I'm 30 years into my career and I learned to program 10 years before that. I absolutely remember when things were very different than they are now, and I'm sure there are some places where they're still different. But I think the direction is clear, technical skills are constantly giving way to soft skills.
I’m also 30 years into my career. I love collaborating. Yet at progress update meetings my boss wants to know not how much I “collaborated”, not how busy I was, not what problems I solved. He wants to see results, especially results that make him look good.