This is fair in theory, and I imagine that some smart, high-agency people take advantage of the situation, but as is often the case, “down time" leads to more down time rather than more time to devote to career advancement, networking, and so on.

In fact, one might think that one day, when free of obligations and with plenty of gas in the tank that is currently used for work, one will pick up the barbell, take long bike rides, and build the body one has always dreamed of showing to their partner. But they are much more likely, instead, to spend more time watching the latest horrible Netflix TV series or eating burritos. The right analogy for mental and physical energy is not the tank, but the flywheel.

Not at a FAANG but at a large company that has its fair share of world experts in various technical disciplines.

At least in my company, the path you suggest will make you miserable (it did me). You are not seen to be at their level, and you will more likely become a pawn and someone to offload grunt labor to. Yes, you will learn, but you have less than a 10% chance they'll let you use that knowledge to do work at their level: They need grunt laborers, and you are more valuable to them as one because you've gained that knowledge.

Oh, and they always had more pathological behavior amongst them. Very poor at teamwork, etc.

There are exceptions, which is why I said "10% chance" instead of "0%" :-)

The good news is whenever I went through this and switched to a less sexy team, I was seen as "the really smart guy who worked with the smart people" and the new team would value more than they should.

Snap. I, for my sins, am new at a WITCH company (please don't throw rotten fruit at me), and there is an obscene amount of dead time in my calendar and will be for the foreseeable. I'm rinsing their training and development resources and should have the full suite of certs I want within 6 months completely free. Certs that would literally cost thousands to acquire privately. If they want me to do some actual work I'd be delighted but I've worked at multinationals before and I'm not holding my breath. What I won't do is sit around doing nothing.

I posit there is another category: people who don't accept or can't deal with being idle, but are not careerists and so instead of following your advice or resting-vesting, they find ways to spend their time helping solve actual problems in the company.

My theory is that these people keep many companies afloat, because they go proactively solve the problems the resters are not solving because work, and the job-optimizers won't touch because not promotion-track.

> to catapult their careers ahead.

What is the value of one’s career? To make more money? Why is it smart to devote so much effort to moving up when you’ll be dead and your work completely forgotten much sooner than anyone cares to admit? If you’re seeking lasting glory then the well trod path there is politics, war, or art: technologists generally are not remembered outside their time (with maybe literally a half dozen exceptions since antiquity).

I ask this honestly, because at this point in my own career the only answer I can come up with is the personal satisfaction of getting better and more knowledgeable about something I at one time enjoyed.