...and after passing that hurdle, you're suddenly exposed to a large body of work in the organization that has no processes to ensure continuity and modernization other than some rudimetary coding styles and PR/code review flows. The only way to stick around is to make your output so incomprehensible that the only way to maintain it is to keep the lead around.

For all the talk about hiring the best, once they're in the goal becomes to stop hands-on development as quickly as possible and to add friction to improving the knowledge repository as much as possible.