Besides the job hopping stench, there are other very real cost to switching jobs.

- there are three “levers of power” in an organization - relationship, expert, and role power - in that order.

At any job, especially at more senior levels, having the right relationships with the right people means for example the difference between you having to send a ticket to the IT department and wait in a queue to get those test VMs you need and being able to send a Skype message, they set everything up for you right then and then you submit the ticket as a formality.

- Expert power and developing a reputation for knowing what you’re doing is the difference, especially at a small company, is the difference between having to wait for the “IT department” (or the outsourced Amazon support people that your company hired), and being given admin access to AWS so you can do it yourself.

When people know you and trust you, you can punch above your role.

You lose that at a new company and it is a “cost” to get it back.

Also, at a company I’ve been at for three years, I know where most of the bodies are buried. I’ve buried a lot of them or know who did and I know the technology. I spend the first 6-12 months at a new company working extra just to ramp up on the company’s code base, and because I’m usually changing jobs to learn new-to-me technology, learning the tech stack. That extra time has a “cost” on my personal and family life.