4 years seems like a long time, but I'd easily say that's true for a year. I suppose it's relative to your definition of good.

In my industry, 2 years is about what it takes to feel the ramifications for your bad decisions. Leaving before then makes you a bomb thrower in my not so humble opinion, leaving everyone else holding the bag. And unless you are a contractor, it's a resume red flag for me.

I get that not all jobs work out, but a long string of < 2 years makes me skeptical.

The labor market is just kind of complicated. Having a four year span where your real income goes down because you didn’t job hop isn’t ideal, but it’s totally possible that it pays off in the long run quite handsomely.

Ideally, you want to have a dynamic economy where people have very many paths to prosperity. In the US, you have people like Ted Sarandos who managed video rental stores for 17 years before taking a job at Netflix, which eventually led him to become CEO. Or you have Doug McMillion, who started at Walmart in 1984 unloading trailers at a distribution center and rose up to the CEO position. And you have Dara Khosrowshahi, the Uber CEO, who started his career in investment banking, became a media executive, and then served as Expedia CEO. An of course, there any plenty of extremely successful entrepreneurs who never worked for anyone else before founding their own company.

For sure there is a downside. To develop real expertise in a domain takes time. We have people hopping between jobs before they've even learnt how to do one job right.

In software it can take a long time between writing the code and seeing what happens to it in the long term. How it evolves. How it's maintained. Quality. If you never close this loop you're limited in your growth as a software engineer.

I don't know what the magic number is but I can relate to 2-4 years before you feel like you're comfortable in a new and complex domain. So ideally people stay some reasonable time beyond that. The company is getting a lot more out of this person then they did when they started so it should be a win-win. Instead what's happening is this guy is going to jump ship, get a higher pay, and be totally ineffective or even contribute negatively, and the company will hire someone new and possibly pay that new person more than the original guy, only to have him spend a ton of time getting up to speed...

What kind of things made you feel not good in the first four years? Just unfamiliarity, something else?

Maybe we can fix the things that make workers uneasy in the first few years.

I think it's bimodal for me, lots in the first six months bringing fresh eyes and outside ideas followed by a lull of a couple years before the benefits of realy knowing the company sets in.