This is false:

- If I have a job at Google as an IC, I can look for IC jobs.

- If I have a job managing 10 people, I can get a manager-level job.

- If I have a job managing 100 people, I can get a director-level job.

- If I have a job managing 1000 people, I can look for a VP-level job.

- If I have a job managing 10,000 people, I can look for a C-suite job.

Average tenure in a position in the tech industry is around 3 years. No one will know or care what objectives a Google manager achieved, or whether those were hard or easy to achieve. If you want to grow rapidly in your career, the things which matter are:

- Connections, network, and references

- What shows up on an interview (e.g. self-improvement)

- What shows up on your CV (e.g. how many people you managed, or the brands you worked on)

The place techies get stuck in career growth is by trying to do the "right thing." By the time you're trying to rise to the top of a corporate ladder, the competition is extreme, and the people who succeed play the game as optimally as they can.

I might be able to look one level up. An IC might be able to manage a small team. However, your odds of having an IC move directly into the C-suite require nothing short of a miracle (a Nobel prize, being the author of Linux, or something similar).

Respectfully, I think this is a little bit naive. While the job ladder doesn't explicitly specify org growth as a requirement to get ahead, leading more people is a classic way to get ahead as a relatively junior manager. If a manager's peers are all more senior but are leading similar sized or smaller orgs, it will seem natural that the junior manager should get promoted to the same level. Building orgs is a classic way for managers to get ahead.

Actually delivering value is a huge advantage too, but as far as I've seen is not prerequisite for getting ahead.