Hehe literally the first sentence of that first article: “Job hopping is nothing new.” The standard advice when I graduated college was to move around every 2-3

Hehe literally the first sentence of that first article: “Job hopping is nothing new.” The standard advice when I graduated college was to move around every 2-3 years if you want to get promoted. I’d be willing to bet it was a common story 60 years ago. Furthermore, all three links you provided are talking about all jobs, including labor and minimum wage jobs, not software engineering jobs. Hopping in those jobs has always been common, and it demonstrates very little about software engineering or even white-collar jobs in general. Here’s hard evidence that job hopping in all jobs has been going on for many decades: https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/nlsoy.pdf https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/nlsoy.pdf “Individuals born in the latter years of the baby boom (1957-64) held an average of 12.7 jobs from ages 18 to 56, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.” That puts the average job duration at less than 3 years. “Although job duration tended to be longer the older a worker was when starting the job, these baby boomers continued to have short-duration jobs. Among individuals who started jobs between the ages of 35 to 44, the average individual had 25 percent of their jobs end in less than a year, and 61 percent end in fewer than 5 years.” 1.) is cherry-picked post-pandemic data and seems to contradict what parent claimed (rates were just as high in 2006), 2.) you’ve overstated (a decline in rates does not mean it “no longer happens”) and 3.) proves nothing. I’ve never in my life been asked to sign a training agreement (never even heard of them, and they are definitely not “standard” in tech companies), but as you pointed out: the contract is there to prevent people from doing expensive training and then immediately job hopping, which would be a crappy thing to do. If you take the training and stay there for more than 3 months(?), 6 months(?) then you get training. And BTW you can’t complain about 2.) and 3.) in the same breath, or you’re contradicting yourself.