The labor market is just kind of complicated. Having a four year span where your real income goes down because you didn’t job hop isn’t ideal, but it’s totally possible that it pays off in the long run quite handsomely.

Ideally, you want to have a dynamic economy where people have very many paths to prosperity. In the US, you have people like Ted Sarandos who managed video rental stores for 17 years before taking a job at Netflix, which eventually led him to become CEO. Or you have Doug McMillion, who started at Walmart in 1984 unloading trailers at a distribution center and rose up to the CEO position. And you have Dara Khosrowshahi, the Uber CEO, who started his career in investment banking, became a media executive, and then served as Expedia CEO. An of course, there any plenty of extremely successful entrepreneurs who never worked for anyone else before founding their own company.