"personally I've only had one employer since I started working 9 years ago" I think your experience is an anomaly. I'm nearly 40 and I've had a couple of jobs

"personally I've only had one employer since I started working 9 years ago" I think your experience is an anomaly. I'm nearly 40 and I've had a couple of jobs with something like the freedom you describe (and these [eg. chumby industries] ended only because the company went out of business, not because I left willingly), but the vast majority of jobs, even the supposedly exciting start-up (non-founder) jobs are much more restricted than that. There's a fairly predictable cycle that occurs at many employers where if you're lucky enough to find a job working on a completely new product (which is ideal for a lot of top developers), you work on that for a year or so, get the first versions out, and then go into a trickle maintenance mode where you're mostly dealing with adding small, mostly unexciting new features. If you were instrumental in helping developing that product, the company will usually be reluctant to let you off of it even if they have other cool things to work on. You tend to get trapped by your early success and become defined by the first project you worked on despite the fact that everyone would probably be better off if you were assigned to the new thing and less experienced developers were put on your maintenance tasks. To be fair, there are companies out there that don't fall into this trap, but they are few and far between. Like Michael, I've become pretty blase about job-hopping because of this. If I join your company, I'll give you at least a year and I won't leave you hanging between important release dates, but if you aren't giving me an environment where I am being challenged on a fairly regular basis, don't expect me to be there 3+ years down the line.