Agreed - the better take is "getting promoted in large tech companies requires marketing" (and even that is only true for the senior roles, in the junior roles,

Agreed - the better take is "getting promoted in large tech companies requires marketing" (and even that is only true for the senior roles, in the junior roles, being good at your trade is typically enough to get promoted to "less junior"). But people have different ways of expressing this same idea, because it gets tiring to see/read it in only one form.... so I guess one has to get a bit provocative in order to draw attention :) (and to be fair, given how distasteful many programmers find the "marketing" part, it's somewhat useful to have many different ways to tell them that it's needed).