If I've learned anything about working, it's that you never quit without another job lined up. Employment seems to be a prerequisite for finding employment.
Working at a single place for 10 years and having 0 connections to other companies is not going to put you in a good place to find a job. I imagine they would struggle to find a job regardless of whether or not they quit.
agreed. I'd add the condition that it sorta depends on who you're working for.
10 yrs at Google will be viewed differently from 10 yrs at at&t. The former will still leave you with a good chance, but probably at salary level nobody could match. The other one, you better never lose that job without starting your own company.
It depends on your experience and career trajectory. You have a lot of firm specific knowledge, which makes you more valuable to the firm but if you're using an internal stack maybe the only people who value that knowledge are the company you're working for. That's a bad bargaining position. And if you've been at the same company for nine years and have not been negotiating aggressively for raises the whole time there's an excellent chance you're underpaid because job hopping every two years is really the only semi-reliable way to get a 20% raise.
That's a negative signal as well: it shows that you job-hop frequently, get bored easily, and can't commit to any one company. In some companies (particularly startups) that's fine, in many it's the kiss of death.
I think that what hiring managers want to see is that you fully exploit the opportunities available to you. That means that if you're in a good employer and given a lot of responsibility, you stay. If you're in a dead-end job where you're not learning anything, you leave. If it's a good company going through a rough patch, you stay. If it's just a bad company, you leave.
Oftentimes that means you'll have stints of varying lengths on your resume: you may have a few of 1-2 years when starting out to find your footing, then a longer stint of 4-5 years at an industry-leader, then a shorter stint at a smaller company where you're given more responsibility, then a startup, and so on.
I don't know about this. So far I've left jobs with nothing lined up 4 times. That's every time. So far, finding work hasn't taken more than a couple months of dedicated searching. Maybe I've gotten lucky, but it hasn't seemed that difficult. Uncertain and scary at times, yes. Actually difficult, no.
If I've learned anything about working, it's that you never quit without another job lined up. Employment seems to be a prerequisite for finding employment.