The whole point of staying in sfba rat race (at least to me) is getting exposed to a lot of different things working with a lot of different people/companies

I got to have a lot of internal transfers to further my learning.

I got to build active-active systems that handled user sessions and core business APIs to the tune of 80,000+ queries per second. Caching layers, hand-optimized replication, eventual consistency algorithms, etc. Outages would cost millions of dollars an hour.

I worked on one of the teams responsible for building a migration path from on-prem to cloud, getting workloads from bespoke containerization onto k8s, securing clusters, and developing automation around CI/CD.

I joined an ML team to build product, did various frontend work, maintained important developer platform pieces... It's hard to enumerate it all.

You can have a full tour of tech inside most big companies. And you can continue getting promoted and working up the comp ladder.

That’s same thing that OP is doing except without associated pay raise bc you’re trapped within one company. A lot of people move projects every 2 years at faangs. I don’t much difference between that and switching companies entirely personally

If you know more of a company's stack, you're worth more to them [1].

I was getting $400-$500k total comp in Atlanta. None of us were seeing a compelling reason to leave, at least anecdotally in our limited sample size observations.

In any case, I left to pursue my own startup ambitions. I added one to the count.

[1] Granted, some problems require fresh blood, new ideas, killing internal weirdware, questioning assumptions, new domain experts, new leadership, etc.

That's less attrition than I would expect from retirement alone (falsely assuming age was equally distributed) 90%+ doesn't seem plausible

It's factual.

If I had to guess, most folks at my last office were between the ages of 20 and 45. We only saw one retirement during my tenure. A few folks left to a local startup and did far worse than when our company IPO'd and 100x'd our options. I could name everyone that left and count them on my fingers.

We collectively maintained a spreadsheet of Atlanta hiring dates and frequently compared our seniority against our colleagues based in SF. Most of us were in the top 5%, according to an internal employee registry API that could tell you your seniority rank.