Not a mindless cog, but more as a merchant or even a labour supplying Lambda function. Just simply acknowledge that my employer and I are trading, the arrangement may end at any point for business reasons, and likely will end in a few years as our needs diverge.

Needs can include a nice workplace and you can negotiate specific details about what that means to you. I did not mean to say that it needs to be money.

A screwed hiring system is something most companies appear to be able to afford, given how many have one. When that same experience is flipped around to the employee, they can't afford it and it's a disaster. Few employees want zero job security and an expectation to be wading through the job hire swamp every couple of years.

You're not describing an employee, you're describing a consultant. Not everyone wants to be a consultant, particularly since most people don't get any training in it before they have responsibilities. If proper entrepreneurship was a subject at school, then maybe people would be willing to be their own business, but that's not what the system creates (or wants).

> Few employees want zero job security

Fair, I can see why this might bother people. I don't think job security is a thing (career security perhaps), but I can get why its absence would be disturbing.

> expectation to be wading through the job hire swamp every couple of years.

The high level of turnover in this industry indicates that people at least tolerate it. The only people I know who make it 24 months in a role are chained by stock options.

But not all of us want to trade at that level of granularity. 'Do you have any mechanical engineering jobs' not 'Do you have any ceramic ball bearing housing design jobs'.

There can be vast difference in the work of two engineers with the same “Java - very good” in their CVs.