"most bright engineers were promoted into management so the ones left programming at 40 weren't so bright."

Just wow. Quite a bit of agism there. In my experience most CEOs are not technical, and thy want "business guys" in management. This ranges from big companies (my manager at Amazon had a criminal justice degree and could barely operate a computer, and his IQ was less than 100) to startups (often the CTO will be technical, but also a founder, so there's not a lot of opportunity to become "middle management" during the startup phase.