It's hit by a bus because an employee leaving, or dieing of a prolonged illness leaves you time to plan for a departure or possibly ways to retrieve information from them after they are gone. Immediate unexpected death is a worst case, and "hit by a bus" neatly sidesteps a lot of questions such as whether there was someone with them, whether the other party in the accident was hurt, etc which can derail the point.

Perhaps its "hit by a bus" because assuming that an employee will give you a solid 2 weeks of documentation on leaving and will be able & willing to answer questions after they leave is very much not a safe assumption.

Seeing it as a euphemism is, itself, morbid.

“Guys, I have some bad news. Brian, our star programmer, is leaving to work for a competitor.”

‘Oh no! We depended on him so much!’

“Hah! I’m just messing with you. He was hit by a bus and died.”

‘Phew! I was worried I had a job that didn’t pay competitively!’

Flight risk is another term one could use.

Devs stay in one place like 15 months

Occassionally a 2 year stint just so some Gen X-er that reviews their resume’ doesnt consider them too noncommittal

No need to mince words about people leaving

I don't know if this is the norm outside of SV. I typically stay four years at a position and almost every interview I've had, people will comment about how short of a tenure that is.

It's definitely not unusual for developers to stay in roles for a decade or more. Especially very good ones.

Its not the norm outside VC-backed tech land

There is just a lot of stuff to build and a salary that needs to increase 30% every other year

I see all the comments about needing huge pay bumps every 2-3 years and then I also see things about how you can’t get a job in sv over 40. I wonder if it’s related

Food for thought but probably not

I'm not so sure the 30% pay increase with every job hop is necessarily the norm either. Maybe at first when you're moving up from entry-level to senior. But in some markets, you hit the regional salary cap after four of those and you're stuck with 2-4% annual raises -- even with in-demand skill sets.

If I posted the job offers I've received for having experience with Spark/Hadoop, building / productionizing machine learning models (since 2011 even), an AWS certificate, and 15 years worth of other worthwhile skills, people here wouldn't believe me because they are so low. Definitely well below the startng salary of someone at Google. Yet I've had three, all of which were basically identical.

Hmm. Been at the same company over five years because there were drastic changes/new things every six months. Luckily they were able to do a few promotions and stuff... :)

Mind providing a source for this? I read this all the time but it doesn't match my experience here in Germany.

1.5 to 3 years doesn’t seem to be too far off the mark.

https://insights.dice.com/2016/07/08/how-long-do-tech-pros-s...

Hmm, data compiled from "Public Profiles". I wonder where they got "Public Profiles", listing people's profession and length of tenure. Could it be places like LinkedIn or Dice, and could it be that such places overrepresent engineers inclined to switch jobs?

Personally, I'd be disinclined to interview a candidate with >= 3 jobs on the resumé, none of which lasted longer than 2 years. Taking into account the time spent for them to get up to speed, and the time their successors would have to spend taking over their code, it seems unlikely that their tenure would make much of a positive impact.

Furthermore, a key driver of experience in software engineers is maintaining their own code over multiple product cycles. Job hoppers not only don't acquire that experience, but may actively fall into a habit of bailing as soon as they get sick of their own code.

Well,two points.

- Salary compression especially early on in your career is real. Most companies don’t do market adjustments after you are hired and only adjust salaries by a predetermined very low amount. The only way to get market salaries is by frequent job changes.

- If you have a job and people are willing to hire a job hopper, why not leave? At some point it will be a negative but when that time comes, just stay at a job until you get a better one. Also, if you do change jobs make sure it’s for the right reasons. For me, it’s technology, environment, and money in that order.

Covers only the SF region (with a questionable data gathering methodology).

Thanks for the backup

Maybe some people stop wasting their lives tallying the years instead of tallying those 000s

In b4 “but I like my manager and team”

Same for me. I've been at SAP for nearly 7 years now, and I know only a handful colleagues who left the company. Some people moved to different teams though, so that may count as well, but retention is still way way way higher than 1.5 or 2 years.