>You can do that successfully for an entire career, and there are even some people that’ll tell you it’s a way to optimize earnings over time. If it does, I believe it only optimizes earnings for people who can’t get to those next level skills. The biggest earnings come from building and growing with a winning company.
That works well if you can get a job at a winning company, but the majority of companies are not winning companies. The majority of positions are in companies that do not properly reward their workers for loyalty and hard work. The data does support that finding a new job leads to higher pay on average, though that may be variable depending on the economy and may not scale after many years of shorts stints (ex., maybe newbies benefit more from job hopping than veterans). [0]
I'm a job hopper. The natural progression for me was to follow my curiosity to new projects and new challenges until I no longer sell my 40hrs / week to a single company but I handle the issues of multiple companies. I'm thinly spread out on various technologies and approaches and while I may not provide value (or provide it marginally) to growing / established companies, my specific skill set works very good for early stage companies. I get to work out my curiosity, I get to make more money, and my favorite part is that I am able to be there to transform an idea into a business, and for me, that's a satisfaction I enjoy rather than dealing with challenges for years upon years.
What I'm trying to say is that perhaps there are different people, different companies and different approaches. When I interview (I rarely do nowadays), I think the first step is establishing whether I am a good fit for the company, and if the company is a good fit for me. Talking to a holier than thou hiring manager that spends the interview belittling me for choosing to hop and waving away the potential advantages I could bring to the table settles that pretty fast.
That works well if you can get a job at a winning company, but the majority of companies are not winning companies. The majority of positions are in companies that do not properly reward their workers for loyalty and hard work. The data does support that finding a new job leads to higher pay on average, though that may be variable depending on the economy and may not scale after many years of shorts stints (ex., maybe newbies benefit more from job hopping than veterans). [0]
[0] https://www.monster.com/career-advice/article/switch-jobs-ea...