What’s the average tenure of an engineer at a big tech company? (Ep. 434)
Ceora, Matt, and Ben chat about the global impact UX decisions, like a chronological timeline, can have on users and society. Plus, the team explores the average tenure of a Google Employee, the continuing churn among developers as demand for talent stays high, and what it means now that ride-sharing apps, which once promised to undo the taxi industry, are finding ways to partner with traditional cab companies.
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.
Uber is forging an unlikely alliance with two taxi tech firms.
The ultimate chron job – ensuring users can access a chronological feed on their favorite social media without sacrificing your recommendation algorithm’s potency or data.
Our lifeboat badge of the week goes to alkber, who explained how to convert seconds to minutes, hours and days in Java
Tags: the stack overflow podcast
8 Comments
Google employs a lot of engineers in the SF Bay Area, which in my experience has quicker turnover than other areas, so its 1.1y tenure doesn’t surprise me. I’d estimate a typical Bay Area engineer changes jobs every 12-18 months. (Disclaimer: I’m an outlier: 13y at the same company, 7 of which were in downtown SF. I’ve seen people come and go, though now that my employer is regularly recognized as a “best employer” in tech, the average tenure of my peers has gone up.)
Thanks for highlighting the alkber answer. I think it’s significant that the moderators have tagged even that question as having been answered already, foreclosing the possibility of further excellent answers. Just another instance of how SO’s moderation system is its own worst enemy.
This reporting is a bit disappointing.
(A) the Google number is from at best 2019 (looking at the linked article date), and there’s no mention of this fact
(B) there’s no discussion of what that number means (e.g., is rapid growth driving that number down)
(C) the linked article for the industry average says, “Among the FAANG group, software engineers stay at Netflix the longest with an average term of 3 years. The company with the worst retention rate was Apple where software engineers only spend 1.9 years on average.” We’re clearly not comparing apples to apples here, since Google is at least 1.9 years by whatever metric is used there.
To add on to what D Landry said: the linked article for the industry average includes a metric for Google in their chart, with 2.3 years as the median tenure. It doesn’t make sense to use a different data source with a different methodology for comparison instead.
This statement is also flat-out wrong: “…which stands in contrast to a broader average of 4.2 years for software developers across the board.” I assume you’re referencing this line: “Around 50% of software engineers only stay at a company for two years before switching to somewhere new. The national average for job tenure is 4.2 years so software engineers stay at one place for half as long.” The original report makes it clear that the 4.2 number is for *all* types of jobs, not software engineering specifically. For software engineers, it’s lower (according to them, 2 years, which places Google at just about average).
“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.”
As I understand from the cited reference, 4.2 years is not an average for developers.
It’s probably nonsensical to talk about average tenure. Tenure at departure probably follows a power law curve, and averages usually aren’t meaningful for things that follow power law curves.
Very poor reporting. The Developer Pitstop article is blatantly misrepresented here, and in fact claims an average industry tenure of 2 years, explicitly contrasting that with a 4.2 year average tenure outside of the software industry.
Google often hires highly skilled individuals who can earn more if they joined another company or started their own business. Having a lower tenure for a product company is somewhat bad as training itself takes a significant amount of time. Imagine they spend 3 months to train someone to work on their products, then in 9 months to lose them? They should lower their expectation level, and hire somewhat mediocre people who are most likely to stay in one company for long time. Besides, some people are mediocre not because they are dumb, but because they are not given enough opportunities by companies. They expect the employees to know so many techstacks.
They can also increase the rate of hiring people from other countries too as Google offices are not in every country in this world, for instance instead of publishing job opportunities for specific location, they can state willing to relocate if the candidate is okay with it, then the job opportunities are not tied to any specific location, they hire people from any country like Africa, Asia, Latin America and then give them a choice to migrate to their desired country where they can fill the position easily. This allows Google builds a borderless ecosystem where the multiculturalism thrives, and empowers the people of the world.