A little dated [2018], but still rings true: The average tenure for engineers at many major tech companies is ~3 years. Thus, you'd expect new hires at a rate of 30% annually just to maintain staffing levels. To determine headcount growth you, should look at year-over-year changes in total employee count, not just the number of new hires. TLDR: Meta's new-hire rate is not atypical.
> The median tenure in tech is one to two years before moving on to another team or company [1].
Note that individuals who switch jobs often inherently will figure in a higher number of tenures that you’re taking the median of here. This means the majority of software engineers will actually have a longer tenure.
I think engineering onboarding is one of the most overlooked ways to increase organizational productivity. I'd guess that the average tenure of an engineer is about 3 years. From my experience I feel confident in my abilities at a new company after 6 months. That gives 2.5 years of good work per engineer. I've been working on an engineer onboarding tool to reduce new hire ramp up time. I'd love to hear your feedback https://gainknowhow.com/software-companies.html
That's an important point, especially with the oft-repeated statistic of 2-years as the average tenure of an engineer.
Of course, averages (even if true) are like stereotypes.
It would be interesting to see the tenure data on the experts (consultants/implementers) of large-scale systems, other than at the iconic ones (e.g. Google, Netflix).
What would you say is an average engineer tenure in our industry?
Roughly speaking, 35% attrition means an average tenure of 2.7 years.
When I asked engineers how many year do they think an engineer stays at a job in the industry, I got answers between 2 to 3 years. While I aim for longer relationships and lower attrition rates, knowing the benchmarks is helpful when judging whether something is good or bad.
That feels (to me) about normal for engineering though; I feel like a lot of engineers tend to stay for around 2-3 years; roughly, ~40% percent per year turnover?
Not that this is necessarily a good thing. I feel like most of the turnover is completely preventable, should the employer want to actually keep employees for longer than 2-3 years…
That’s a really interesting perspective. How much is point-in-time performance compared with potential-future-performance?
Meta level E3 with a crazy post-college salary looks like a waste of money on paper, but if they are looking like the kind of person who will make Staff Engineer in 24 months you’d want to keep them on board.
Similarly, a Staff Engineer with 4y of tenure, vested out, and killing it feels like a flight risk. Do you go out of your way to retain them, knowing they’ll probably leave soon anyway?
I’m just speculating here. Are there any real patterns like this that you’ve heard of?
"Average tenure at Google has been reported at 1.1 years, which stands in contrast to a broader average of 4.2 years for software developers across the board....Tech jobs at many so called titans and disrupters last less than two years, according to research from Dice..." - https://www.stitcher.com/show/the-stack-exchange-podcast/epi...
I find 1.1 years as average incredibly low. Is this really the case?
The software engineer tenure dataset is probably a really weird one where there's a normal bell curve with an average around 2 years and then another much flatter curve that goes from ~4-12 years for the folks with golden handcuffs at pre-liquidity event companies.
Edit: I don't know how or why this is on the front page of HN. This seems like a super low traffic/low effort blog.
Well I mean tech tenure is what, like, 8-20 months anyway? We’re not building bridges; software projects complete quicker on average than your average megastructure. People move on once the project is done
and you know I have extra domain knowledge specific to this role
Funny story, at a previous employer people who had been there 10+ years, would always say, it takes 3 years to really hit your stride in this company. They meant the time taken to have made the contacts and established the reputation that you could really be effective, be trusted with important decisions, and so on. It was a vast company and operated on multi-year cycles was a large part of the reason.
But the average tenure of an engineer at this company was 2.5 years...
Congrats! What do you think about the seemingly more common approach for newer grads to work 2-4 years per job and then move on? I hear MBA grads on average stay in their first job ~18 months. It's around the same length for software engineer jobs: https://deeptalent.com/blog/tenure-length-tech-titans-compar....
Where I work now longevity is highly valued, and I think leadership is disconnected with the reality of today's job market.
But the constant job hopping among engineers can come at a cost: Higher expectations of productivity from the go. Less training. and similar.
If you hire someone, knowing that they'll only stay for 1-2 years, you obviously want them to be as productive as possible for that time period. In traditional engineering firms, you'd probably spend the fist N months on training, and won't get to touch production in a long, long time.
This culture kind of reinforces the "hire fast, fire fast" mantra that tech companies love.
+1 for this. At six months At my current place I am in the top half of engineers for seniority and this has been one of the nicest places I’ve ever worked. At previous companies I’ve been in meetings where high level managers veto prospective hires the entire team wanted because they had been at their current company for “too long” where “too long” was 4 years without moving into management.
It’s not uncommon in my experience to hear engineers say they would view tenures of 2-3 years as a red flag for hiring other engineers, but the hiring managers who actually make the decision have always preferred short tenures of hopping around or staying at one place only if there’s a title change every ~2 years.
Large traditional engineering companies have tenures like this. I joined a dev team working on CFD software and the average tenure was over 10 years. Made even less sense when by jumping I’m working on much less difficult code but getting paid a lot more.
Am I the only one that doesn't see that as unreasonable? It's not like you aren't accruing equity during that time; you still get the full year's worth of options at the 365 day mark. And the ramp-up time with new engineers can be so long that the first year isn't nearly as productive as consecutive ones.
A buddy of mine who worked at a giant company (not strictly tech but you'd recognize it) said he heard from his boss that the company effectively considers the first year of a software engineer's employment a wash as far as cost/benefit. I can't imagine they're the only ones. In that case, why would you reward people who jump ship before your break-even point?
Depends on the location and industry probably. In a company of 25 software engineers, I am coming up on 5 years in a few months and I'd say about 3/4 of them have been with the company longer than me. That said, I probably will be leaving soon, because 5 years is a long time.
I get why engineers hate it. I am on a team where at 2 months, if we become fully staffed at some point, I will be in the top half of seniority between resignations and transfers to new teams.
It is quite concerning to see so much knowledge about how things work walk out the door and it is miserable if something goes wrong and nobody left knows it existed. So I get why engineers view a year as hit and run.
But yes, companies seem to interpret staying a year or two as evidence of growth/a highly desirable candidate.
https://www.businessinsider.com/average-employee-tenure-rete...
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