A boss-type one time: "When I was with X, I built four datacenters"
Me, with a career that overlaps a time when one or two people building a datacenter with a little help from contractors for e.g. the electrical work and hvac, wasn't unheard of, for about three seconds, in my head: "Damn, that's pretty impressive"
Me, by the end of the three seconds: "Oh, he means he told other people to build four datacenters and that was very likely the extent of his involvement."
I'm going to assume that you are not in a management position from this statement? It's virtually impossible, unless you have extremely high-functioning workers, to do this.
People need oversight so they don't go off the rails, management so others don't step in to distract them, leadership so they can be guided in the right direction, etc.
Even with awesome direct reports, I can't think of a time when I just handed someone an extremely complex project and left them alone and was presented with perfect success a few months later.
Management is a skill; don't disregard its importance.
Imagine actually being so self-absorbed as to think that all of the folks who actually possess the technical skill to build the thing you’re daydreaming about couldn’t possibly do their jobs without your ‘leadership’… as if the only hand that doesn’t need held is yours… the guy who can’t actually build anything.
I used to get so angry about all this credit-taking, but after 20 years, it kind of just washes over me now. Look at every company's "About Us" page and you'll see beautiful headshots of top executives with captions claiming to have "Built product X" or "Developed application Y" when they probably never wrote a line of code in their lives. It's so pervasive in every company that, as an IC, you just have to accept it or you're going to give yourself increasing anxiety until you explode.
Well in theory it's quite an adventure to get support and secure funding and generally make something possible, so the credit is not completely misplaced. And like other commenters said, nobody thinks they did that with their own hands. At least nobody in their right minds.
The problem is that assumed knowledge is so implicit. If you're not familiar with the norm, it's easy to get confused about what someone actually did. Add to that the inherent desire of our ego to over-inflate our own importance, and misunderstandings don't get corrected.
Personally, I prefer to call out leadership explicitly: "lead teams who built out four data centers."
Getting other people to do something — at all, let alone correctly — is actually a huge task. You should not dismiss the efforts of a manager who orchestrated four datacenters, that's very impressive.
Me, with a career that overlaps a time when one or two people building a datacenter with a little help from contractors for e.g. the electrical work and hvac, wasn't unheard of, for about three seconds, in my head: "Damn, that's pretty impressive"
Me, by the end of the three seconds: "Oh, he means he told other people to build four datacenters and that was very likely the extent of his involvement."