That might be true for high earning, in demand programmers, finance types, or doctors, but I doubt it’s true for others, especially outside of large cities.

People find a place to work and then stick with it, out of complacency or other properties. It’s why employers famously provide minimal raises, and you earn far more if you change employers.

Employers are betting people will rather accept lower pay in exchange for less volatility and perceived risk, and they are correct.

A good friend and current roommate of mine has spent his entire working life doing menial work. Kitchens and factories mostly. He changes jobs just as often as your average resume-driven-developer. Not for raises of course, those don't really exist in menial work, he just gets sick of one place's shit and moves on to a different place with a different set of bullshit to deal with, just for variety.

This makes no sense. Just because you switch jobs doesn't mean you can never talk to people at your old job never again.

Meeting your former colleagues is like the high-school reunion that happens once per decade. It is too rare, and it is obvious that most of the things that connected you in the past are not there anymore.

Again, this isn't some law of nature. I regularly connect with old colleagues, we all went our separate ways and a lot of our commonalities changed, yet somehow I can still talk to them, see what they're doing, etc.

Of course it doesn’t mean that you can’t talk to those people ever again, but unless if you put in a lot of ground work to create a common connection external to work, most of those friendships will evaporate the moment they lose the shared experience of working at the same place.

Millenial or not, those friend networks are still how you'll be able to find the better jobs when you're older.

I've gotten better jobs through networking and none of them were friends. People should recommend others who are good at their job, not friends.

It's important to be _friendly_ at work but that doesn't mean someone is your friend.

I've gotten several jobs through colleagues, none of which were based on having made an actual friendship in the sense that I hung out with any of these people in my free time. It was more like networking and was based on professional experience and capability.

Imagine you're on a spaceship, say the Nostromo from Alien. And your biggest skill is making others do your work. I'd say you'd be the first in line to be spaced.

That's precisely why you want to make friends at every shop, since you'll all be rotating jobs and running into the same people in future jobs, sometimes hiring them sometimes being hired by them.

I wonder if that is skewed my certain kinds of jobs (Ex: retail and software) where a skill is broadly transferable to many many other companies.

As a fairly specialized electrical engineer, I could still find employment at several other companies which do what I do, but I'm not itching to move (been at the same company for a decade). Is everyone on HN constantly shifting jobs?

I'm not sure it's just specialization. Outside of hands-on engineering, there are a lot of roles in product management, developer relations, marketing, finance, etc. that are pretty transferable between companies. There's just a lot of job hopping in SV--especially between often short-lived small companies--that you probably see less of elsewhere. Personally, aside from one company that went pop in the dot-com era--I've never been at a job less than about 10 years on the east coast.

For the Bay Area specifically:

1.) Small startups die often

2.) People vest their RSUs and realize their employer doesn't value them enough for a refresh so they take a giant pay cut hence start the job search