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My observations suggest that this applies far more to lower performing employees than higher performing ones since the barrier to change jobs is lower for top tier talent.
I think talent and the capability to market/self-promote oneself (I believe only for the latter capability, the barrier to change jobs is much lower) are mostly uncorrelated.
I think there is an unstated underlying assumption in this comment that "higher performing" implies "drop-in transferable technical/social skills" legible to the target interviewing entity. Maybe for software but for wide swaths of actually engineering (double graduate engineers in this family) I doubt that rather strongly.
The default 2 weeks vacation for the decades experienced new hire is a pretty strong tell.
I think talent and the capability to market/self-promote oneself (I believe only for the latter capability, the barrier to change jobs is much lower) are mostly uncorrelated.