Last startup I worked for is on round 7 of layoffs / restructuring right now.
Your mindset is only valid in the explicit context of a company
A) not having cut you
B) having cut others prior to you
As soon as that context is lost in the next two years when you get fired or find a new job, you're back to square one, except you're also competing against Joe Google Engineer.
I think this is a normal trade off. You left a team or a company for more money. There is nothing wrong with this, but you necessarily need to start from a new context since it’s a new team. When times are tighter because of economic cycles, this means that you should be more intentional with changing a team so that you are sure you will be able to compete with Joe Google Engineer. It’s still a competition in some ways, and that’s fine.
If you find a good place, stay a while in tighter economic cycles in order to build more skills and rapport and then hopefully, and realistically based on experience, you’ll have more runway within that company even if times are bad or if your performance sometimes is low because of life events.
Especially in vesting environments, where devs need to wait for the vesting to have made their R&D-heavy roles worth it from a monetary point of view. Well, large firms will need to give their devs enough runway now so that they can depreciate the costs over a longer period of time instead of only thinking in the short term. They can still fully deduct the salaries, just over a longer period of time. It is 5 years for domestic R&D / development and 15 years for foreign. I think that is good and will cause better treatment of developers in the long run.