https://www.inc.com/jeff-haden/why-googles-high-turnover-rat...
This isn't some Google specific thing. The cargo cult "look at our super exhaustive, endlessly demanding hiring process" is a farce everywhere. It's actually a bit paradoxical because it actually selects for employees who don't want to actually stay with you, they just want to be able to say they were willing to endure your gauntlet.
I’ve worked in places where people stuck around for years because they believed in the company and technology and wanted to successfully ship a product. In fact, I still view repeated 18-month stints as a bit of a red flag.
It’s a big industry. There’s a difference between a norm and something that a sizable subset of people do.
Also, Google's median tenure of <1 year was due to hiring, not employees leaving. In other words, that number included people who hadn't left yet. I think if you look at people leaving Google, average is about 3 years.
Google would have to be growing at >300% per year for this math to make sense.
But even if it's 3 years ({X} doubt), that's still cartoonishly low for a hiring process that drags on for months and months.
>I think if you look at companies like Citadel, which routinely fire the bottom 10% as part of the job description
Almost all tech companies target firing/pushing out a considerable percentage of employees per year. It actually is incredibly common, even if it usually doesn't make the news. They used to do it overtly via stack ranking, but now they just do it more quietly. Microsoft punted 2000 "low performers" in the first two months. Brutal firings with zero severance, immediate cancellation of health coverage, etc.
> Almost all tech companies target firing/pushing out a considerable percentage of employees per year.
Not firing, but managing out. It's very different culturally.
The guy I replied to did say median tenure (where I was talking about mean or average tenure), so relative to a median tenure sure, doubling the staff would do that.
But you said average, in which case no that isn't true. Google is a 26 year old company. If you randomly distributed tenures across a hypothetical employee base (1-26 years), it would take something like 1200% growth to get the average tenure under 2 years. And of course Google's actual employee count growth rate over the past decade and a half is more in the range of 12%, so a couple of factors off for that.
Even when people say the average tenure is 3 -- doubtful -- that still requires an insane level of turnover for a company growing so slowly, relatively, and being so old.
Sometimes layoffs are unfair, and sometimes the wrong people are let go. But often it's entirely necessary and the right people are let go.
[1] - Which makes the whole gruelling, multi-month hiring process positively ridiculous. It would be much better for this industry if companies hire fast and fire fast, instead of delusions that they're finding the magical employee base that will be with them forever.