FBXL Social

The advice to change jobs every 2 years to make sure you optimize the amount of money you make intuitively seems like the sort of thing that is statistically true but is missing the bigger picture. It's the sort of thing that seems like it'll work for a while if some people do it, but if enough people are doing it hiring managers will start selecting against it.

Usually 2 years is the amount of time it takes for someone to actually be up to speed at their job, so spending 2 years training someone just to have them rush off at the moment they're actually useful doesn't seem like a good look.

My experience (and I'm not in silicon valley so take it for what it's worth), has been that karma has a tendency to throw opportunities to you every 4 years, and 4 years is long enough that your boss won't feel taken advantage of for training you. OTOH, 4 years often is enough runway for other opportunities to show up in the one organization.

It isn't like a hard time limit -- sometimes switching much earlier is the right answer if something you couldn't possibly live without happens, and sometimes those opportunities come to you and they're not worth taking, and sometimes you're in something really good and it's worth sticking around and becoming the old greybeard who knows what you're working on inside and out. But a hard 2 year career cadence will eventually start showing up on your resume, I suspect.