[beambot]

A little dated [2018], but still rings true: The average tenure for engineers at many major tech companies is ~3 years. Thus, you'd expect new hires at a rate of 30% annually just to maintain staffing levels. To determine headcount growth you, should look at year-over-year changes in total employee count, not just the number of new hires. TLDR: Meta's new-hire rate is not atypical.

https://www.businessinsider.com/average-employee-tenure-rete...

[brilee]

3 years is deceptive - in an exponentially growing company, the majority of employees are fresh, pushing the average tenure low. The relevant number is "length of tenure at time of severance", which I believe skews much higher. Any company seeing 30% churn is having a bad, bad time.

[dadoge]

“Length of tenure at time of severance”

That is such a better metric, why is this not used more often

[naniwaduni]

It has its own almost-opposite problem in only counting employees who did leave.

[jrumbut]

Then you get into the field of survival analysis, where you get methods that can handle this problem (called right censoring IIRC).

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaplan%E2%80%93Meier_estimat...

[matt-attack]

Exactly. If half your workforce is happy and has been there 20 years, that’s entirely non reflected in such a figure. There must be a better metric.

[askafriend]

Well you can also just count current employees' tenure. That fixes the problem and is qualitatively consistent IMO.

[ivalm]

That’s how you get 3 years because everyone is new.

[askafriend]

You're right - my mistake.

[neves]

I thinkit is impossible to get this number

[piva00]

What do you mean? Every employer I've worked for had data for the starting date of their employees, when someone leaves you have an end date of employment. It's a pretty simple metric to calculate.

[michaelcampbell]

I think by "this number" they mean "a better metric", maybe?

[dougmwne]

In fact, the overall head count has been rising rapidly.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/273563/number-of-faceboo...

[tclancy]

Based on my limited observations having been in a similar situation for a year, I would guess the average tenure is Equity Award Years less percentage of people who get fired in less than the value of Equity Award Years.

It’s a good way to keep reinventing wheels.

[Cthulhu_]

And this 3 years is kept up artificially - companes like Meta or, as a colleague of mine who works there now, Github / Microsoft, offer stock packages that they can only use after four years. It's a pair of golden handcuffs; they would move on a lot faster I'm sure if it wasn't for that + the wages offered.

Having Microsoft or Google or Meta on your CV is a very valuable thing to have, regardless of what you actually did there, because they're still perceived as having high standards.