John Ternus, who takes over as CEO of Apple this week, will do so as a longtime insider: he joined Apple in 2001, just four years after he graduated from the University of Pennsylvania, and spent the next two decades rising through the company's hardware engineering ranks, becoming senior vice president of hardware engineering in 2021 and running the teams behind products including the iPhone, iPad, Mac, and Vision Pro. He succeeds Tim Cook, who followed a similar path: Cook joined Apple in 1998 and took over from Steve Jobs in 2011 after 13 years at the company. Ternus is far from alone. Satya Nadella entered Microsoft in 1992, only two years after completing his master's degree, and was named CEO in 2014 after 22 years inside the company, while Andy Jassy joined Amazon in 1997—24 years before he took the top job—having spent much of that stretch building and running Amazon Web Services before succeeding Jeff Bezos. Three of the world's most powerful technology companies are now led by executives who built their careers largely from within, and the pattern extends beyond them: Sundar Pichai joined Google in 2004, became its CEO in 2015, and added the Alphabet CEO title in 2019.

Their careers counter one of the most persistent pieces of modern career advice: that getting ahead means moving around. For much of the last thirty years, we have been told that long-term employment was dead. As large employers moved from employment guarantees to frequent downsizing during the 1980s and 1990s, ideas of loyalty became passé, and career advice has frequently revolved around embracing free agency—taking charge of our own careers through regular mobility across employers—a vision popularized around the turn of the millennium in books such as Daniel Pink's Free Agent Nation. Career success, according to this view, comes from proactively moving to wherever your services would be most valuable. No sector has epitomized the image of easy-come, easy-go employment quite like tech. Yet the biggest tech companies are now being led by organization men, executives whose career paths look as though they have come straight out of the 1950s. The phrase dates to William H. Whyte's 1956 book The Organization Man, a study of mid-century employees who built lifelong careers inside a single large corporation.

I have been studying employment for over two decades, and I have started to suspect that the way we talk about modern careers may be all wrong. Yes, loyalty is dead, and employment is now something of a marriage of convenience—but we have not moved to a world of hyper-mobility. People are not quitting their jobs any more than they were twenty-five years ago, layoff rates have actually come down, and the anticipated surge in freelance work has not materialized. There is also growing evidence that building a career inside a firm continues to be a more reliable route to success than trying to plot a path across companies. The insider tech CEOs are not outliers. They are a sign that we need to reconsider how people get ahead.

Consider an analysis of the careers of the top 10 executives in each Fortune 100 firm that my colleague Peter Cappelli, a management professor at the Wharton School, published with his coauthors back in 2024. Although the average executive had moved around a little more than John Ternus, their stickability is nonetheless striking: the average executive worked at only three employers during the 28 years that it took them to reach the top, and had been with their current employer for 13 years before accessing the executive suite. Those executives may be more mobile than they were back in 1980, but there remain remarkably few job-hoppers in the top ranks of corporate America.

When we have studied careers below the executive suite, we have found that upward mobility—moving into more senior jobs with more responsibility—is overwhelmingly more likely to happen through internal moves within the same company rather than by moving to a different firm. Another study, of Finns, found that moving up into a more senior job was almost six times as likely to occur through an internal move compared with a move across firms. The reasons are not hard to understand: moving somebody up in their career, letting them take on a job that is bigger and more responsible than any they have held before, is always a risk for an employer. Employers are much more willing to take that risk on somebody they know well—an inside candidate—than on an outside hire they know little about. There is also ample evidence that those internal candidates tend to do better once they get the job, as new hires initially struggle to navigate an unfamiliar organization.

There are, of course, many reasons why moving employers can benefit people in their careers. Many people are in jobs they do not like, and they should be looking for something better. It also makes sense to move around to learn about yourself and the kinds of work that you enjoy. Recruiters can be reluctant to hire people who have spent much more than a decade at the same firm, because of worries that those long-timers will struggle to adapt to a new employer. Even the rhetoric around free agency—which emphasizes the need to take charge of your own career, navigating across employers in search of the best opportunities—serves a useful purpose by reminding us that our employers rarely have our long-term interests at heart.

But we also need to rebalance our understanding of how modern careers really work. The things that allow us to be successful in our careers—doing good work and getting access to new opportunities—still depend on the kind of familiarity and trusting relationships that are built through longevity within organizations. The advice that you have to "move out to move up" has it exactly backwards. Those hoping to become the next John Ternus, rising to lead a trillion-dollar corporation, should understand that they can move out, or they can move up—but it is hard to do both at the same time.

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