Maybe. The best engineers are also naturally talented. It is a fact that to be a good engineer you need to be very smart. You can get by with just a CS degree and a Cisco certificate, but you won’t be a game changer.

How many Principle Engineers are there at the FAANGs? How important are they to the business, and how long did it take them to get to that level, in their careers?

I am not convinced that there is any natural talent involved in being a good network engineer.

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2002/07/22/the-talent-myth

Now add football (soccer), basketball, baseball, hockey, volleyball, and we're at probably tens-hundreds of thousands of professional athletes with multi-year contracts.