You can have one year of experience 10 times by working 10 years in a single company and not self-actualising. One could argue an employee can stay too long at a job for the comfort and lack of ambition, coasting.
Even at the executive level, staying long does not guarantee owning to one‘s mistakes, since there are many ways to deflect blame and many places where top of the org has little accountability.
I am saying they are independent concepts. Basically, if you stay for one year it is not possible to learn the effects of longer projects (very valid point you mention). _But_, staying 10 years does not mean necessarily that you did learn from 2-3 years cycles. It will be _possible_. It could mean you are very good at deflecting, coasting, or playing golf with the right people, among many other possibilities.
Unrelated: today is on the news that Unilever's CEO will be resigning after 3 years, which also seems short to me.
"Some new director showed up, reorged us, and left" is a failure mode for organizations. It causes huge problems and needs to be avoided.
Wait til you hear about Australian Prime Ministers
This is not guaranteed. You will limit yourself out of some jobs, but that's true with any career decision you make. Someone somewhere isn't going to like what you did and not give you a job because of their views. But as long as the pool of jobs is large enough, you can find something. If the pool of jobs shrinks so dramatically that this isn't supported, you might survive but you'll end up having a lower salary for it long-term.
These arguments seem to be against full time position job hoppers, but you may not be asking if they were doing contracts or purposeful short-term engagements. And perhaps a contractor is looking to go full-time. But before getting the full story, you've already made your decision.
There is not a optimal path which grants you maximized salary and maximized opportunities. The industry supports multiple career archetypes right now. Don't cast doom and gloom to make people feel anxious that they chose the wrong path when there are viable alternatives.
Now, it's certainly possible that another 3-5 years and another 2-3 companies would negatively impact my ability to land interviews, but I haven't seen the slightest impact yet.
Might be some correlation.
The problem with this take is that over time, those incremental improvements become harder to find for someone who has established a pattern of job hopping.
It’s not a big deal when you’re 24 years old and you’re not really owning major initiatives and long-term projects. It becomes a big problem when you’re at 15 YOE and your resume has ten different companies where you never stayed long enough to even see the long-term consequences of your decisions.
I’ve seen a lot of pattern job hopper candidates who clearly have “One year of experience repeated 10 times” who can’t really compete with someone who has fewer jobs but stuck around long enough at each company to make a bigger impact.
If job hopping continues, it catches up to you later in a career.