Absolutely 100% positive. I was largely an individual contributor all that time, and only did some unstructured, untrained, unguided people & project management. Perhaps because it was such a niche, engineer-dominated environment. Several years after leaving that company, I quickly learned to effectively manage people and projects, architect systems using more mainstream/open source tech and eventually reached exec level (but that's a different story).

That's really some fields I'd love to get into -- less need to talk to people and more need to talk to the machine. What a dream! Alas I only scratched the surface of C++.

Ah, that's the missing punchline: you had ambitions to be something else other than an engineer, and you (quite correctly) recognised that you were never going to grow your wider skills at such a place.

For someone who had wanted to stay an IC, I don't think the move would have been quite as wise. Being in a niche, engineer-dominated environment, and being paid extremely well for it, is nirvana for many lifelong ICs. It certainly feels very different from the experience of Arthur from the linked article.