In a chat with Gen X IT uncles, an ex-colleague had a grand theory. His hypothesis was that all the director-level IT guys he knows relied upon the coat-tails of another senior manager to climb up the career ladder. In fact, he asserts that skills don't really matter. So it's not what you know but who you know. As we had the same colleagues in two US MNCs, I thought his observations are not too bad, but they can't be applied to all cases. The folks who are now directors in my generation cannot possibly be incompetents, they had some basic level of skill to supplement their political savvy. From the last post, I sensed that younger tech workers largely disagreed with my analysis but the older guys agreed with my enlightened position on dealing with CECA and career obsolescence. But I need to make a clarification. In this...