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People moving on to new jobs is not a bad thing — and not only when they have been laid off. That’s why it’s uplifting to see employers encourage this process and even praise new entities that are being formed, such as Kyutai. — Anna
Back to academia
Do you hate revolving doors? You don’t have to; you’ll come around eventually! But dad jokes aside, I understand why figurative revolving doors can be vilified: When regulators join the industry they were supposed to regulate, or a related lobby, it raises all sorts of ethical questions on how well they did their jobs in the first place.
Revolving doors, though, can have a less ominous meaning.
Colloquially, the term sometimes simply refers to people moving back and forth between the public and private sectors. But a “revolving-door workplace” can also qualify an organization “that people tend to enter and leave very quickly,” according to Google’s English dictionary’s definition provided by Oxford Languages. (I’ll try my best to ignore that their example was a newsroom.)
In the startup world, though, tenure is not really a thing, and being a revolving-door workplace is part of the game. In that context, knowing that people can move on to other jobs on all sides of the problem they have been tackling can be a good thing. As the saying goes, it’s a form of career security when tech jobs don’t offer job security.