In Spain, staying at your alma mater used to be common (it's also a society where families are more tightly knit and people move less in all jobs in general, mo

In Spain, staying at your alma mater used to be common (it's also a society where families are more tightly knit and people move less in all jobs in general, moving for a job is seen as undesirable for most people). But now there's a cargo cult in academia, Americans always move after the PhD so we should move as well, and not only to another institution but abroad. Most grant or position calls directly give points for having worked abroad, or even have a requirement of 2 years abroad or similar. This is absurd for various reasons. Firstly, what the linked post says. Secondly, if moving is so good, it should be reflected in general in the scientific production, you're already grading scientific production so there should be no need to consider that. Finally, since academic salaries in Spain are crap, this actually incentivizes many good researchers to stay abroad (they move due to the points/requirements with the idea of returning to Spain, but stay abroad due to better working conditions). In my case I'm a professor at my alma mater (although I did make short stays abroad, like maybe 1.5 years in total). But if I were in early career years right now, I probably wouldn't be able to do that due to the increasing mobility cargo cult (I would need to stay abroad for longer and in larger chunks of time). I'd probably have ended up permanently abroad or maybe in industry. Lately I start to see some (at the moment, minority) voices against this cargo cult from feminists, as moving can be especially taxing for women that want to be mothers, and feminism in Spain is quite strong lately. I hope this can lead to eventually scrapping that nonsense.