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Comment by fragmede | Hacker News Reader

You're right, but that's been true since the beginning of the tech boom (but isn't exclusive to tech) when no one works for a place for several decades. Companies weather this in different ways but attrition has always been around.

What's causing people to believe that the latest round of attrition is any different?

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I'd speculate that perhaps more senior people are moving, and/or a greater overall rate of attrition combined with much more complex technologies and organisations. In other words, it might be harder to become good at jobs now, and fewer people stick with them. Just a hunch but definitely seems to be where the incentives point with loyalty penalties and tech bloat.

In my experience, education certainly seems to not have kept up with computing, at least in terms of having massive academic-industry partnerships like a doctors residency or a trade apprenticeship .

I’d definitely agree that it is probably harder to become good in older organizations - the technologies are probably generations behind the current state of the art and the learning curves are high for those older technologies.

Just thinking through keyboard, but it’s probably reaching the point where enterprises need to evaluate aqui-hire or outsourcing entire development departments due to attrition, due to the incentives to leave for regular employees.

Promoting high employee turnover could actually be a very effective strategy for a company's long term sustainability.

If your company is hostile to people sticking around for decades, then it makes it that much less likely that you end up stuck with an machine that relies heavily on poorly documented tribal knowledge that's likely to start falling apart as your core people start cashing out.

Similarly, it makes it much easier to make the business case for switching to outsourcing and insourcing business models. That makes it much less likely that you have to worry about losing money to people who “work from home”.

> What's causing people to believe that the latest round of attrition is any different?

The Great Recession

The Great Resignation

The Great Dying (due to COVID-19)

> The Great Dying (due to COVID-19)

Repeating this wise comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23769427

The COVID death counts are hopelessly over-counted. This is why there's a cottage industry of people pointing out things like "COVID deaths" which mysteriously also suffered from being murdered, or drug overdoses, or undiagnosed leukaemia.

Then you get into the problem of care homes being authorised to report COVID deaths without any testing or formally trained opinion at all.

How about undercounting?

There’s very likely to be severe undercounting of COVID-19 due to the same reasons that crimes of victimization are underreported: shame.

Not to mention the swaths of homeless and disabled people that probably didn’t get counted.

Not to mention all the cases detected with home antigen tests and never reported to a lab.

It's shocking to see such a statement so far into the pandemic. This is solved and known already, and while complicated, we've figured it out for some time. We can easily see the massive amount of deaths when we look at excess death numbers. Covid deaths are, if anything, undercounted. To believe anything else at this point is to bury your head in the sand and avoid all scientific evidence and medical consensus.

https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/how-are-covid-19-d...

I won't argue this topic since this thread is about AWS, but the article that you quote says "Experts calculate the excess death rate by comparing figures for a given period with the average for that same period over several previous years." That's not how experts calculate excess deaths, since that algorithm produces totally bogus answers. Here is how real experts compute excess deaths, compensating for seasonality and population changes: https://euromomo.eu/how-it-works/methods/

Excess deaths is a perfectly valid statistic to base policy off... if policy makers maintained a hands-off approach and didn't radically change society through out the pandemic.

Can you in good conscience say that the typical rate of death remained steady while the following happened:

* a majority of given populations remained at home (lock downs - meaning no travelling to work in multi-tonne death traps)

* practised increased hygiene protocols (masks, more frequent hand washing)

* did not visit elderly homes (at least, less than usual)

* many people were reluctant to get timely health care (due to fear of catching COVID from medical facilities)

* ate worse and excersied less

* infected elderly patients were sent back to their nursing homes (to typically infect the entire facility)

There are so many confounding factors that on the face of it, should result in a radically different death profile... and almost every country faced the above to different extents.

Anyone claiming to be able to work out the actual number of people who died from COVID-19 from excess deaths is being disingenous at best.

> Anyone claiming to be able to work out the actual number of people who died from COVID-19 from excess deaths is being disingenous at best.

I think you have that backwards: disingenuous at worst, a scientist at best.

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