> I hear that the median time of service for FAANG SREs is just shy of 2yrs. Dirty open secret if it is true.

That's most places, FAANGs notwithstanding. 6 months getting up to speed, realizing what a clusterfuck it is by 12 months, dealing with it to 18 months, and then getting to the I-Want-Out point at 24+ months.

Plus the whole "jump ship every 2-3 years to maximize salary" thing is possible for FAANG-level engineers.

devops are like brake pads on trucks, you stomp the hell out of them whenever you didn't look far enough ahead, and when they start to make a squeaking noise you throw them out and get new ones.

I know at least ten SREs at Google with ten years service.

>I hear that the median time of service for FAANG SREs is just shy of 2yrs. Dirty open secret if it is true.

I wouldn't read too much into this. I've worked at tech companies where 4 years of tenure was considered old and non-tech companies where 8 years was considered young.

Anecdotal evidence or course, but IME people with strong skills in the tech industry (even if it's tech marketing or tech HR) have a lot more options to change jobs for salary or experience reasons. If you're ambitious you're going to be even more inclined to move up or move out.

I work for a tech company and like you said, I've almost been there for 4 years and apart from my own department I would genuinely struggle to name anyone else on my floor (~100 people). I could probably count the number of people I know on one hand.

Whereas three years ago, I knew everyone's name across three floors.

Tech turnover is just so high, even our C Suite have almost all changed twice since I've been here.

I'm easily one of the longest standing members of staff and we have over 1,000 tech employees.

Not a secret and it is true.

https://www.payscale.com/data-packages/employee-loyalty/full...

Most of SRE/sysadmin/operations leave the field after a few years, not just the company. It's not a rewarding job to be on call and have to fix issues from other people.

You didn't say this, but to be clear for those who may have assumed it:

2 years median time of service != median employee quit after 2 years

2 years median time of service can be explained by lots of people quitting, or by lots of people being hired (and usually a mix of both).

I've noticed at Google that some positions (like recruiting coordinator) seem to churn quickly, while others (like software engineer) churn much more slowly. I haven't seen many engineers quit in less than two years (and certainly not in 1.1, which is the median in the data you linked to)

If a company doubles in size every 2 years, then mathematically, you cannot have a median tenure of more than 2 years.

If the company has hired enough employees recently, then the math would check out.

Just curious, did you burn out because of the workload?

SRE?