One way a company can be mismanaged is burning money it can't afford on ridiculous employee perks, like when Twitter got its own DJ.
You join and are granted 400000 options at $10 strike and stock is worth $10
2 years in and the stock price is now $110
You think the company is terribly run and the stock with crash at this point. However if you quit, you lose the 200000 unvested options worth $2M on paper
Even if the stock crashes to $20 they are worth $200k
Hard to find a better paying job in that situation until the options are fully vested
You don't just say on day 1, "I don't think the company is going anywhere, but I'm committing to staying another 4 years".
I stayed for ~1 year after I realized I needed to get out: At the time I was getting paid very well, had very low expenses, and was saving to quit my job and start my own company.
My original plan was to stay a few months longer to build up some more savings, but "things happened" inside the company. I was re-assigned to a horrible manager; I hunted around for another assignment (on the advice of my boss's boss,) but that was going to be Flex-based. (And I bet correctly that Flex was going to fail in the marketplace.) I decided that I was better off quitting and self-teaching myself HTML + Javascript instead of getting paid to learn Flex. However, I could have stayed for a 2-3 more years, worked in Flex, made a boatload of money, and selectively applied for jobs elsewhere.
> One year into it you knew the company was going to fail yet you stayed on for 3 more years?
There's a lot of risk in changing jobs: If you "have a good thing going," it's best to bide your time until a better thing comes along. Interviewing is quite time consuming too, so don't assume that someone can just casually make a few phone calls and walk away with a "better" job. (This is especially the case if you have kids, a house, a mortgage, and a significant other who has their own career.)
Also, it's hard to job hunt when you're already over worked, both at home and the office.
Also, the devil you know. Every new job is a gamble. After a while, all the jobs kinda smell the same. So what's the point in playing frogger?