[aprdm]

Totally. It's also ridiculous difficult to change companies since your brain becomes pretty much the context of your current organization. It's IMO harder to apply to other companies as explaining your day-to-day requires a lot of context and nuance about your company that do not fit a resume.

Further to that, the interview process of staff/principal are usually akin to a senior dev with technical grinding except that isn't your day to day and hasn't been for a while.