I think this ability to quickly move around is heavily underrated.
Bad manager is just incentivized to lodge preemptive mild performance reports against his best performers. Not enough to become a stain on the team members, just enough to prevent them from switching teams. Bonus to the bad manager: they are rewarded for keeping compensation plans from expanding as much as other teams because the mild performance reports help curve down pay adjustments.
The only practical way I've seen to counter this response is strong leadership over such a manager that recognizes what is actually happening and has a quiet talk with the manager. That rarely happens. I'd like to hear what policies others have seen that mitigate this dynamic.
Hear me out. Why is the entire IT culture trying to do whatever Google and the FAANG companies are doing? Its ridiculous. The rest of the world have completely different needs, completely different skill levels, and completely different management. There is literally nothing the rest of the world has incommon with FAANG.
What they do will not work for the rest of us. I'm super tired of hearing about what they do. I do not look up to them and I'm not impressed by them.
Remember tech before FAANG? If you don't, you probably think I'm a raving lunatic because today, it sure seems every single engineer loves whatever FAANG does.
* At least at Facebook and Google. At Apple I have heard that people are encouraged to stay in one area and become experts in that area. Mobility seems to be less of an emphasis.