My dad worked for the same company for about 40 years. My brother only recently left a job where he'd worked for over 20 years.

My sister and I are the only ones in our family who switch jobs every few years. Switching often seems to be better for our careers, though my brother has worked on some very interesting stuff. (All of us are in IT.)

That's hard to do at a startup though with FANG salaries and benefits being so extreme. You really have to double down on the value prop of small agile teams, culture etc. Even if you nail that it's hard to turn down 2-3x salaries.

In my non SV experience, most people will leave for +20-30% though, which quite accurately reflects the incompetence (and/or ego) of managers. It does not even cover locating and hiring a new talent. Nevertheless they are happy to pay hiring agencies through the nose. Sometimes I wonder whether they get kickbacks from it.

you can stop wondering, many offer kickbacks.

> That's hard to do at a startup though with FANG salaries and benefits being so extreme.

Why is a startup in the early cash-poor stages competing for FANG-level people?

This only works in a monopoly or oligopoly, where you can’t easily switch careers. If you were out of AT&T, your experience there couldn’t translate easily to other companies. This works even today: there are few ex-Googlers, because experience inside Google is most valuable to Google; there are few other gigantic search-first companies to move on to (OK, you can go to Facebook or Amazon or Microsoft and that’s about it).

So, unless you want the economy consisting of a few dzaibatsu-style monopolies, the “loyalty first” approach to hiring is unsustainable.

I'm not sure I agree with the idea that there are few ex-Googlers. I am only one person, but it seems like there are a very significant number of ex-Googlers, likely more than current Googlers.

Not in these days we deregulated telecoms

defined benefit pensions were a huge incentive