Ask HN: How bad is the employee turnover at Amazon for SDEs in Seattle?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9756079

by Flopsy • 11 years ago

8 7 11 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

codeonfire• 11 years ago

I'm going to say 25%, so the company replaces 10k SDE's every four years at a cost of $4.5 billion dollars (based on 4x salary replacement cost and 10k SDEs). Why 4x? There's an army of HR and recruiting people. There's tens of thousands of interviews. And people don't really start paying off until their third or fourth year in a new job.

kasey_junk• 11 years ago

I'd love to see a citation on that 3 or 4 year payoff note.

TheAdamist2• 11 years ago

A friend of mine who just left amazon said that the average tenure was only 18 months. He had been there 2.5 years at the time which is way longer than the rest of the folks he worked with.

Which sounds insane to me.

brucehart• 11 years ago

Did your friend share any reasons why the turnover is so high? I've heard Amazon pays well and it seems like there would be interesting work to do.

Is the environment bad or do people just find it easier to move up to better jobs at different companies once they have some experience with Amazon on their resume?

partisan• 11 years ago

Anecdotal at best, but from a friend who worked there, I gleaned that the pay was not particularly good. They were overworked and there was on-call which came with quite a bit of stress since my friend spent quite a few sleepless nights on calls. Lastly, it seems there was not a lot of room for advancement.

TheAdamist2• 11 years ago

The mandatory 24/7 on-call support for your group, (week or two at a time, every month?) is a huge negative. My friends groups product was for mainly normal working hours professionals on the west coast so he didnt get the crazy all night shenanigans that other groups had.

Ask HN: How bad is the employee turnover at Amazon for SDEs in Seattle?

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