I don't know because I'm old enough that when I was fresh out of college there were no smart phones, and the only people on chat were tech nerds and college students, so the background distraction was just much much lower.

But what I will say is that distraction is bad for everyone, and being objective about ones performance is very difficult. A lot of people claim to be good at multi-tasking because that is what a lot of work environments demand, and so people learn to cope, but on the other side of the coin, many of these supposed multi-taskers have never sat down and thought deeply with enough focus to really solve a difficult problem the right away.

Software development is one field where the rigor forces you to learn this or eventually be exposed as incompetent, but I believe it is useful in any professional work that involves solving problems. Great solutions do not come from raw intelligence, they come from intelligence applied over time. If you can't focus and construct a persistent mental model then you might have a 200 IQ but still not be able to design a good system.