It doesn't take long before the high performers on those teams get sick of picking up the slack. The high performers move on to companies that care, while the team's output continues to decline as everyone pushes the boundaries of how little work they can get away with. Eventually management wonders why certain teams have so many people but so little output, "restructuring" occurs to trim the slackers, and the hiring cycle starts again to build the teams back up.
Performance management is more important than ever when leading remote teams.
That's where a good compensation structure comes into play
The 30 year seniors were pretty good despite their ignorance of the world outside their company.
The newbies have something to prove.
And it takes about 10 years to have a recession... To cut the fat.
Is there any disadvantage to being a "forever newbie" at companies? I learn sooo much when I change jobs. I can't imagine 7 years in 1 position is good for your career outside a chance at management.
Always being in situations where you're learning is a great idea. You should be able to find learning situations as you move up in your career.
Always being in situations where you're a total newbie/beginner is not so great. You should ideally be able to build upon previous experience in some way with each new job. The problem is that your performance will be evaluated relative to some baseline, and constantly being too far on the "total noob" side of that baseline will start to send the wrong impression as you get older.
That's not to say you shouldn't avoid opportunities where you'll need to learn a lot to begin, but you should be evaluating new opportunities with an eye toward career progression at each step. It's easy to hit the reset button multiple times when you're young, but people will have different expectations about baseline competency when you've had a decade of career experience under your belt.
Of course you risk tying yourself to a dead horse that will never go anywhere and now you need to start over from the below the rest: you have experience that nobody needs and none of the general experience everyone else wants for an okay position. Good luck recognizing when/where you need to be to get the good position in 10 years vs a dead end that they don't care about...
Personally, I love the idea of jumping around every 18 months or so to experience new domains, new technologies and learn from new people, but I also worry a lot that this will severely limit my career potential after I've done it for 10-15 years.
I'm 20+ years in and HATE changing jobs. The initial period where I'm Jon Snow (I know nothing) is always annoying and makes me feel like I'm not contributing at a level that supports my role and compensation. I find that it takes 3 months to start to understand conversations, 6 months to contribute to them, and 9-12 months to really be a consistent and effective leader of things.
And the difference is stark. While I could coast and still outperform everyone I now have so much to learn and the progress seems so slow. I'm slowly getting my hunger back and as someone who loves to learn I wonder when did I lose it?
On a more serious note, since no one is reviewing my code, I resorted to automated testing. It doesn't catch all the bugs, but at least it's something.
Sometimes I had 5 different projects at once though.
Very useful for me now that I WFH and not a coworking space.