As I understand, you're saying that empathy is vital for assessing requirements. That's precisely why I mentioned management and team-leads as being likely exceptions.
(But each manager or lead usually has more than one report, so there are likely very few managers/leads compared to everyone else. Hence the general sentiment.)
But not every engineer works in environments or on projects with those roles in place. Beyond that not everyone has the resources available to work with UX teams and proper designers. And if one is in the younger class of engineers, chances are more likely one will be exposed to a wider variety of situations where they'll face the need of or benefits of being expose to better understanding human beings (being one of them) -- especially having entered a market where long-term employment is on the downslide, and experience is more project-based or transient.
