Is Google even good at retaining employees? The average tenure appears to be 1 to 2 years. [1] [2] [3]

Hardly enough time to even know the impact and costs of what you developed and shipped. Kind of makes you wonder what type of work force you're creating when a large percentage of them are constantly leaving. Maybe for ICs this isn't a concern compared to Directors, VPs, or maybe Staff SEs?

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

[2] https://buffer.com/resources/employee-tenure/

[3] https://www.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/news/2019/10/17/thi...

I mean it intuitively kind of makes sense. If you work in a city with many other high paying prestigious jobs, why wouldn't you job hop? There's little risk, whereas if you were in a city that had very few prospects you'd probably stick around longer.

I live in Boston and I jump around every year'ish getting more salary at each place I've worked at. If you worked at Google (or any other prestigious company), I imagine it's far far easier interviewing else where. Especially if you jump from prestigious company to prestigious company.

wow every year? I'm doing every 2-3 which I was worried would be too often.

It's never hurt me, at least IME. I still get recruiters from Amazon, Facebook, Apple, WayFair, and HubSpot hounding once every few months. I think my only skills that stand out are a11y and data viz. A11y seems to be in a real demand as of the last two years, maybe that keeps me in the running? IDK.

I figured people will always need devs and people really blow the "job hopper" thing out of proportion. Every job hopper I know makes a lot of money and they never struggled to find jobs. If anything they seem to have the best jobs from what I see.