Exactly. I've encountered a small number of people who apparently reached very senior technical positions impressively early in their career but when you looked

Exactly. I've encountered a small number of people who apparently reached very senior technical positions impressively early in their career but when you looked at their job history it was mostly a string of 1-2 year stays with a title bump on each jump. SE, Senior, Lead, random nine months as a cofounder of something that went nowhere but says CTO on the resume, Staff, and now after less than a decade they're running the show somewhere with a silly name but a few million in funding. In all that time they might never have worked on a single product with sustainable revenue or been responsible for the consequences of any technical decision they made as much as one year after they made it. Maybe two of those people that I can think of weren't bad anyway - sometimes their inexperience showed but at least they weren't crazy and had open minds - but others were among the most over-rated and damaging people I've ever seen in the business.