That’s a very Silicon Valley tech influenced meme.

I don't believe so. It's the only way to get a proper pay increase in corporate America. Internal promotion in most corporations comes with at best a 10% pay increase most of the time and includes increased workload. If I leave my company and go to another I can pretty easily get 15-20% increase and stay in the same basic job I'm currently at. Most companies don't offer any benefits that increase based on loyalty so I don't know why any would expect someone to stay long term.

Outside of startups, most of which fail anyway, I think you’ll find a lot more stay in the 5-10+ year range than you give credit for. Certainly 20+ is unusual these days. I’ve had multiple 10ish year jobs and don’t expect to hit that number.

Moving jobs entails significant risk, which is one reason why offers are high. Maybe you won't get on with your new manager or team-mates. Maybe the codebase is a tech-debt spaghetti nightmare. You can't carry over the reputation and clout you had built up in your old job and you have to prove yourself all over again, and you have less say in how things are done.

Sure the interview process should surface these problems, but applicants can make a "bad hire" as easily as companies, especially as both are showing their best front, and this is more likely if you are enticed by a fatter paycheck.

>Moving jobs entails significant risk.

Yes - but so does not moving jobs. I have several friends who played the big company game, got to a senior level and then got ditched. Their problem? Well - they got shafted and emptied out at peak expense time; mortgage, kids, divorces etc, they got emptied when they were still 15 years short of thier retirement target, and their CV's are mono-corporate.

This made finding work very challenging.

In olden days you could say confidently that if you got to director level in a big company in the UK you were set. There was a job for life at a very nice salary if you wanted it.

Agreed, it's difficult to make the call when to make your move, and staying too long can be harmful. Generally I'd say it's better to move around more earlier in your career when you're figuring out what kind of company environment is more to your liking and what skills to specialize in. But it's easy to get complacent and stick around too long in one place.

In any case, you have to weigh the pros and cons, but jumping ship just for the lure of a fatter paycheck is not necessarily going to make you happier or do your long-term career any favours.

Yes, true. Jumping ship for money is a motivation to mull for sure. Sometimes you can't say no, it's just too significant in terms of finance. Sometimes it's worth considering that the extra $ will change other pressures (perhaps rent on something close to work that will give back 2 hrs a day travel time, perhaps more / better childcare, perhaps pay off short term debt and change the dynamics of your finances). But, yeah, moving for money can screw things up.

My advice (fwiw) is move for growth. Can you identify something that will change your CV for the good about the new gig. If so then the extra money is essentially paying for your next job - you will be able to find something even better (hopefully p>0.??) after, if this one doesn't work out.

This is all correct but the places I've worked at all had the same problems already:

> Maybe you won't get on with your new manager

Manager turnaround (one per year) because they leave or get promoted is pretty common. In fact the better the manager the quicker they seem to move on to some other team or higher up that has more potential for impact.

> or team-mates

Engineers don't have that much influence on hiring decisions. And even then, it sometimes turns out they may need more hand holding than expected or maybe that you don't get along on a personal level. So the risk is here even if you stay at a company.

> Maybe the codebase is a tech-debt spaghetti nightmare.

Let's be honest, it almost always is like that even where one works right now. But I agree it can be worse than what you are dealing with at the moment.

I think the difference is in attitude to address the issue as well. This is indeed really hard to assess ahead of time. In my last job I thought we had a good attitude towards recognizing tech debt for the first few months, then realized it's not the case and all plans to address it soon appeared to be just empty talk.

> You can't carry over the reputation and clout

Yeah, definitely. Unless you have built a public reputation in the industry.

In the general case you will indeed have to build new reputation in the new place. But often that's also an opportunity for those who failed to succeed at that in their current environment. So it's only a risk if you have something to hold on to.

I believe the risks of moving jobs are likely outweighed by the higher pay check and experience to gain in the new place. A few companies even allow you to come back (given available headcount) if you actually are someone with clout and a record of high impact work. So the risk for those folks is likely not that significant.

I think the bottom line is still that folks don't leave "just for the money". There needs to be some promise of the new job providing something you are not getting now. For successful long timers it's often just "got bored with being in the same place".

The risk of not getting experience at some places is also not to be ignored. It's a balance of course but if you have a few 3 year stints at good companies with some tangible output wrt impact to talk about it's usually better than spending 12 years at one place. Eventually you might end up having to move, and then you'll not have as much salary to expect (or the confidence to ask for it) compared to those who played the job change game.

It’s true across most industries in Australia. The old social contract of employment, “work for us your whole career and we’ll look after you your whole career”, disintegrated in the 90s when companies started treating all employees as disposable. Now it’s everyone for themselves and loyalty between employees and employers is a shadow of what it was.

Not really. I see that pattern across the entire software landscape, from big companies down to startups. It's true that there are occasionally people who stay put for 17 years at Microsoft, but those seem to be the exception rather than the norm.

This too is a type of open door. You see more breadth and talk to more people by regularly changing employers. It enables you to move towards problems worth working on.