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Comment by julianeon | Hacker News Reader

This rate seems high. They're pushing 1 out of 3 people (30%) out of their workforce every 5 years. Is that sustainable over the course of, say, 20 years?

1-2 percent, I could understand. But I would think the labor force simply isn't large enough for this to work, long term, at this high rate.

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There's the "old fart" tool internally that tells you how many people were hired after you. I think after 9 months or so, I was senior to 30% of the corporate jobs. After 12, I was senior to 50%.

Seems like there must be so much effort wasted in getting new people spun up on corporate culture, development style, internal tooling, etc... only to have half of them gone in less than a year.

Or were they simply expanding rapidly at that point?

Amazon hires at an insane clip.

I used the same tool an the numbers were very similar 7-8 years ago.

The amount of people that I saw leaving matches that attrition rate. Many were put on unjustified PIPs.

The 6% in the article is incredibely underestimated.

It is possible that you are missing the point of this. While it works, it is saving company millions in compensation and keep internal upward pressures low. It is absolutely not sustainable, but it ever comes to the point that it has to be adjusted, it can be. And changing those policies will be so much easier with extra cash in hand to 'attract' new workers.

Turnover at amazon is high. In my org the rate of turnover is probably higher than 30% every 5 years. On a 10 person team losing 2 people in a year is 20% right there. My experience of the turnover is that it is much higher than 6% a year.

Typical turnover in engineering is around 20% annually (maybe higher for Amazon), so this 6% target is unlikely to have the impact you are imagining.

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