That sadly makes sense. I’m in a position lately to influence hiring decisions and I’m noticing a similar bias in myself.
As a job hopper myself, I can’t fault others for doing it though. I never hopped for the money. I just got bored or felt isolated in my role. But a nice consequence is that my salary actually appreciably increased, as opposed to colleagues/friends who stuck with the same company.
I've often given developers I mentor the advice they should "zig-zag" to grow their career and get varied experiences rather than stay in one place too long, but my advice was 2-3 years at each place at minimum.
I think anything less than that, and you haven't had time to really learn an ecosystem, and more importantly you might not have had a chance to live with the consequences of your technical decisions (i.e. supporting something in prod that you built).
I know plenty of people who started somewhere, left for a while, and then came back and ended up in a position higher than they would have gotten if they had stayed put and tried to climb internally.
And yes agreed that moving around will 100% grow your comp faster than staying put (in most cases).
I mean I wish I could stay, but companies are greedy and refuse to give out decent raises or promotions regardless of your contributions. The only real way to make more money is to hop between jobs, all the while these companies are making record profits year after year.
Like right now I've been at current co for 3 years. At the start I was getting decent raises after big projects. I now have increasingly more responsibility, I'm doing hiring, I'm doing mentorship, I'm doing huge feature work, I have to waste half my time talking to the braindead stakeholders. And what do I get for that? Absolutely jackshit, I'm getting paid the same I was when I had a quarter of the responsibility and work, yet the company is boasting about making ever more money as they lay off entire teams of people.
Why on earth would I be loyal at this point, it's clear they don't give the slightest inkling of a shit about me or anyone else who does have "Head of" or "Chief" prepended to their title.
That's a self-inflicted wound on the part of the companies though, with them offering relatively shit pay for people who stick around compared to people who switch jobs.
If your next hire is only going to stay for 1-2 years, it doesn’t make sense to hire a junior team member and invest in their growth.