Churn makes for more efficient companies and stronger employees. When you have 20 year veterans who stayed in a single place for 20 years, you have no exposure as a company to new practices developed in other companies. You have no exposure to what performance level your employees could be achieving. And as an employee, your own skills are not well developed by being stuck at a single place for 20 years.
Churn makes salaries adapt more quickly to market conditions too. That's an advantage when the Fed is dumping capital into the market with QE.
The disadvantage is yeah, there's chaos sometimes and loyalty doesn't exist. But you need some exploration AND exploitation too, else you get stuck at a local minima.
It depends on the industry. In any industry not undergoing disruption, having the long-time employees probably is a good thing. They know how to execute processes well, and know the detailed ins and outs when any random thing goes wrong. They also know the 10 or 50 other people to call when help is needed.
When any of those individuals leave, you have to hope they have a successor who's been handed the core knowledge.
Is there any actual evidence of this? My experience has been the opposite, that successful companies have staggering amounts of momentum and institutional knowledge.
It also eliminates chances of a singular long term vision being executed. I'm sure the success statistics of long term visions aren't great, but when it hits, it hits, I think.
I think that comes down to having strong leadership (which you would want to minimize churn in, because the timescales of executing projects as an IC are an order magnitude different from executing on strategic goals). E.g. Amazon, Costco, Patagonia, etc.
If executives could finish meaningful goals in a few weeks like ICs can, I'm sure they'd be switching every 2 years too.
Churn makes salaries adapt more quickly to market conditions too. That's an advantage when the Fed is dumping capital into the market with QE.
The disadvantage is yeah, there's chaos sometimes and loyalty doesn't exist. But you need some exploration AND exploitation too, else you get stuck at a local minima.