There are two kinds of developers.

There's the kind that, when given a problem, will jump in, learn what they need to learn to solve the parts they don't fully understand yet, deliver meaningful iterative results, talk to people as needed, keep you posted on their progress, loop in other team members and offer/request help to/from them, take initiative on the obvious missing parts that would benefit the project as a whole, etc.

And then there's the rest.

Within the first few years of someone's career, you can quickly tell which kind they are. It's almost impossible to turn someone from the latter group into the former.

Yes, everything else is a façade. You can be a "senior" developer with 30 years of experience and still be in the latter group. And you can be fresh out of college and be in the former.

Now some people are extremely good at other skills (politics, interpersonal communication, bullshit, whatever you want to call it) and will be able to seem to be in the first group to the people who matter (managers, execs, etc) while actually being in the second group. But then we're not talking about actual software-making skills anymore.

You can also totally be in the first group and be underpaid, never promoted, etc. There's little correlation with actually career success.