It's a bit muddier with technology workers, though. Engineers do invest in their employers, by specializing in the relevant tech stack. To the extent that the e

It's a bit muddier with technology workers, though. Engineers do invest in their employers, by specializing in the relevant tech stack. To the extent that the employer uses a marketable and generally useful tech stack, that's not saying much, but if you specialize in some legacy garbage processes and systems it could be a net negative on your career prospects. Likewise if your employer wants you to repeat the same year of experience over and over without any realistic advancement prospects. The risk being that you are a proficient line employee for BigCo maintaining their systems written in BigCoLang and then you have a hard time getting a similarly paying gig after you're laid off. And nobody else uses BigCoLang. Sure, we can argue that talented engineers can retrain, but I don't see many weak senior engineer candidates being offered junior engineering positions so they can bone up on a new tech stack. Typically they just say "technically weak" or "not a good fit" and interview the next candidate.