I'm having a hard time believing that world's top talent in software development are fighting to get into Swiss banking. What makes you think that the brightest people are striving to get employment at your bank?

Sounds like Switzerland or Swiss banks have some sort of cultural bias against people who job hop. If companies want people who stick around, they should compensate fairly and reward people who are doing well and delivery quality work in order to retain talent. Many people have families and know that their employer views them solely as a means to an end, so why not treat the employer the same way and get the best possible deal out of them. By rejecting people who move around to gain the best possible opportunity, it creates an unfair bias against people who seek out the best possible compensation for themselves. Having worked in the banking sector myself, banks could benefit from more agile thinking but are instead stifled by bureaucratic processes that do little to promote security or create a quality product. I'm sure many of those people would love to stay and finish the product at conservative companies, but it is very hard to stick around in a suboptimal role that does not grow their skill set when they could be making 50% more money at a new firm. Many of these conservative companies as you put it only succeed because they do not complete in a free market and have unique privileges because of governmental barriers to free enterprise.

My career at one point was a 5 year job, then 3 years, then 1 year, then 3 years, then 2 years, and finally 2 years.

The first time I interviewed (and failed) with Microsoft, the final stage of the interview was with a guy who had been with Microsoft for 20+ years. He looked at my resume and grilled me about job hopping (even asking me about individual positions and why I left).

Ironically, I didn't even job hop just for salary, I did it because of layoffs or really toxic environments. However, all that job hopping was also crucial to gain different experiences I have today in different technologies, patterns, and sets of scale I would have never gotten in my original company.

While explaining this to the interviewer, he started talking about how he started in the operating systems division, then moved to security, then moved to office, now works in an Azure area. He failed to really understand that he was doing the equivalent of job hopping in order to facilitate his own technical growth, and the majority of us do not work in companies where we are able to side-load into vastly different domains without changing high level companies or losing RSUs.

I don't think this was the reason I failed the interview (I didn't interview well that time), but I do think about that.

This sounds industry specific, not country specific. There are plenty of tech companies in Switzerland which aren't as conservative as banks. I've no doubt that life-long employees of banks prefer to employ those who will stay in their role, even when they treat them and pay them poorly.

As for senior roles, you have your data backwards. Senior roles have higher turnover, including in Switzerland. They're paid more, but there is also much more risk associated with the roles. They're some of the first roles to go during strategic and structural shifts.

Do you actually live and work here? Your statements can be generally correct in many places, but they are certainly not correct about Suisse (people are generally paid well and treated even better, seniors really don't move much since they are most valuable employees and are given good conditions... this is really not SV... as written having frequent jumps hurts your career), based on my 12 years of experience here in few companies.

Conservative is the name of the game here, and its not specific to banking, whole society runs like that and you would struggle to find a company behaving differently, mostly just startups.

They simply prefer stability over bleeding edge, and job hoppers are anything but stability, that's obvious from a light year away to anybody with any experience. In fact it signals a person who is often not happy and instead of improving things they just move - one of the trademarks of juniors with big egos.

Also hiring on a perm position takes time and effort (and costs a lot), nobody is eager to waste so much resources again and again just to have potentially slightly more efficient employee.

I've been on the other side and agree with arguments generally, but this is generally their way here and they are doing just fine.

I was going to mention this - it can be a very cultural thing.

Where I'm from (Norway), job hopping every year or every two years, would look real bad. Software Engineering IS a bit more forgiving, but you're still going to get asked "why have you switched jobs five times, since you graduated in 2017?".

In fact, there's a real chance you wouldn't even land an interview. The employer is going to assume one or more of the following things

A) The person gets easily bored, and constantly needs fresh and stimulating work.

B) The person does not (easily) get along with people, or has problems with settling at a workplace.

C) The person is constantly being let go / can't hold a job.

D) The person is very salary/compensation focused, and will jump ship on the first chance.

Hopefully some of these things will be uncovered when contacting references - but there are lots and lots of former employers that will cover up for a bad hire, just to be polite. Or the bad hire is very good at picking people to use as a reference.

So you're kind of stuck with a candidate that's either job hopping because they want to "level up" as far as salary goes, or some other underlying reason they can't stay.

If tenure over 1-2 years is of no importance, then that's obviously not a big deal. There are businesses, ranging from startups to mega corps, that just need warm bodies to power the various projects - easy come, easy go. Be productive from day 1, and work them as much as they can.

But for highly specialized firms and positions, where you spend the first N years on training, job-hopping candidates could be completely unacceptable.

It's definitely culturally-dependent.

In the US, no one has ever asked me why I never make it 2 years at a job. I recently got a new job that gave me a senior title and 50% increase in salary.

>A) The person gets easily bored, and constantly needs fresh and stimulating work.

Oh no, someone in a design and problem-solving role need stimulation!

I get what you're saying, but the idea that this is a negative really stings.

Switzerland, and to a lesser extent Germany, are very very conservative. Switzerland's credo is that the 1950s was a good time, and things should remain exactly as they were then, with minimal changes. When did women get the vote there, again?