Expecting anyone to stay 4 years in any 1 place is at best unrealistic and at worst sacrificing their potential for the team’s success.
We shouldn’t be surprised when people fly the nest, and for what it’s worth this happens at even the best companies - people leave to start their own businesses.
What we can do is aim to have them do the best work can, build a good rep for our team, and (selfishly) invest in a strong personal relationship with them so that in 10 years maybe they look back and pay back the favor.
So why aren't employers doing more to offboard folks with grace, kindness, and compassion (and maybe some degree of expected severance given the goal) if they are really "sacrificing their potential for the team's success" when all that's needed is for the employee to realize they need to move on?
Is loyalty to any employer so utterly and completely dead that I need to enter my future employer-employee relationships with different expectations about loyalty after 1/2/4/5 years?
I'm incredibly fortunate to have lucked out at a place that was acquired 2 weeks after I was let go for being in a similar place as you can imagine when someone spends 4 years somewhere without a promotion or any material recognition of that loyalty. So my 4 years was worth something - at least the after-tax value of my exercised and liquidated stock options.
But that's an incredibly risky basis for value gained by staying somewhere vs. value gained by going somewhere else.
Well, I can see how some people might take that the wrong way and interpret that as getting laid off.
And yes - the reality is that companies are non-fungible and every company will have different values, levels of team talent, investment in their team. Taking the same approach to every company you join, i.e. not going in with a goal/plan in mind, is how you get the average/median outcome for everyone at that company. And you should be going in eyes wide open knowing what that outcome is for every company regardless of which approach you take.
It's the same question of why isn't every restaurant great? Why isn't every haircutter great? By definition, that's impossible - some will always be better than others and the goalposts shift.
We shouldn’t be surprised when people fly the nest, and for what it’s worth this happens at even the best companies - people leave to start their own businesses.
What we can do is aim to have them do the best work can, build a good rep for our team, and (selfishly) invest in a strong personal relationship with them so that in 10 years maybe they look back and pay back the favor.