As a counterpoint to the engineering/product/culture comments providing context on the book, I would point out that Urs Hölzle has recently stepped back from ub

As a counterpoint to the engineering/product/culture comments providing context on the book, I would point out that Urs Hölzle has recently stepped back from uber-manager to individual contributor in the infrastructure space. This is the guy who built the hotspot JIT that added decades to the life of Java, and who engineered Google's data centers and GCP. He obviously doesn't need more money or glory or experience, so ... why? There are a million examples of things gone wrong, but it may be worth studying one example of how someone could have such an impact and still just love what he's doing.