I dunno who these super techies often mentioned here. But since I relocated from Santa Clara to work in EMC CoE this has been my observation of last two years.
The techies are all politicians.
" That's why they are super techies. They can bend rules and get cabins allocated even though they are ICs. The senior techie was a manager in EMC before he got forced to quit and join the infamous dell storage bdc team. He still acts like manager meddling into performance ratings and has say into everything other than technical matters. As far as technical things are concerned they aren't equivalent to even a junior software engineer in EMC. but one thing they are good at is PPT and obfuscating and confusing people. They have zero accountability and good at taking credit for others work and ideas. They ensure they weed out people who call their bluff."