Its just one part of a companies toolbox to increase retention.
If you would tell me that i get my current additional bonus as it is without splitting it up to 3 years, i would of course take it but i assume that internally they were able to form/create this type of program and the 3 years was an internal bargain chip.
I'm not aware of this schema in big companies or smaller ones. Getting a head count is hard, hiring is a lot of effort.
For everything else you have service providers. If you wanna be independent and work per task, thats a totally different story all together.
You have to do acquisition yourself, you have to do training yourself but you earn a lot more money faster.
I still prefer the jobs where i hire/control an external person while having my career in a stable work environment. Which also means i'm the expert and while you can get experts from external, as a company you still need your experts who keep all the business experience with them.
i would not subscripe to saying a year or 6 month is frequently.
At least for me frequently is 1-3 years while i do wanna know why you left your company after a year.
But it is easy to come up with a reason why you switched early and in this market, i take one person who swtiched early but feels like a good candidate over one who feels like a bad one.
The market in germany was empty the last 5 years, we were happy to get what we could.
My parents don't know how to do this and would call me and stop trying to 'solve it'
Chrome and Firefox are quite visual in this regard.