If you're going to count finance & consultancies, you might as well count big tech, too. It is entirely unreasonable how many silicon valley non-programmers (a

If you're going to count finance & consultancies, you might as well count big tech, too. It is entirely unreasonable how many silicon valley non-programmers (and a few programmers) have gotten here via both of those channels. Moreover, I have directly heard from more than a handful of people out here that they only went to business school because they had no idea what they wanted to do when they left their investment bank / consulting firm, so it seemed the best idea at the time. Honestly, I think upper management for large corps is far more rarified air than the others. There is not only an extremely restricted population, but a lot of these leaders are selected via a revolving door. The average CxO only spends something like 3yrs at any given company, then gets hired by a different one -- rinse and repeat. You can consider only two pipelines for this role: 1) folks who successfully managed and grew smaller companies and are hired into those roles from outside, or 2) folks who spent a whole career at the company.