Your job is to deal with customer requirements (i.e. listening to people), and translate those into code other engineers (communicating with people) need to maintain, on a priority/schedule your management (also people), create to deliver business value. This is a people business, whether you like it or not. Develop those skills.

You never finish learning. People who tell me "I know [technology]", invariably are not experts. People who tell me "I am expert with [technology], but learn new things all the time", get it. If you don't like learning _every day_, get out now.

On that point: becoming an expert at a specific technology is great early in your career. You need to be great at learning new technologies as your career progresses, so consider learning how to learn as a priority over learning a specific language or framework, and be curious.

Working with good managers is more important than working with good engineers (trust me, the main difference between a FAANG and a failing startup is management skills), but working with bad engineers still sucks.

Using something that already exists that does 80% of what you need it to do, is normally a better win then writing something from scratch that does 100%. That 80% might even be too high - the real number could be as low as 50% or even 10%.

Mentoring is the best way to develop your own skills by orders of magnitude, but it's also one of the hardest. Look for opportunities to mentor and be mentored, all the time.