The companies employees don't want to leave in 2023

Yeah, this is simply a chart of worker mobility. I think you nailed that one.

> "don't have any better options" seems like a better interpretation to me.

This is certainly the case for a company like Lockheed Martin. I used to live in an insular area where defense contracting was by far the dominant area of employment; although you could hop from one contractor to another you ended up having a very finite career progression because each of these companies were all competing for the same contracts which all had the same rules regarding how much they can pay employees. Staying at one such company for a decade isn't particularly uncommon because all of the others offer practically the same benefits and pay. Although the government periodically updates these rules they haven't kept pace with the market for some time now. Such downward pressure on wages combined with:

- a conservative technical vision that keeps worker skill sets 5-10 years behind industry

- long production timelines owing to slow, broken security and procurement processes (which are merely replicated in a new form every time somebody tries to introduce a streamlined alternative)

- promotions based on seniority and credentials instead of technical acumen and impact (since this is how the government attempts to objectively measure employee value)

- lack of technical rigor in interview processes (because contractors are incentivized to hire anybody remotely capable due to cost-plus-fixed-fee contracts, i.e. the "bodies in seats" mentality)

...results in employee stagnation and the phenomenon that you see in the article. I don't imagine that it's terribly different for large, entrenched interests like oil and freight companies. These are, after all, mature organizations with workforces many orders of magnitude larger than Dunbar's number with a dizzying number of orthogonal incentive structures spread across layers upon layers of middle management. Avoiding these types of issues at scale is obviously difficult - it's just a fact of life.

Average tenure is also significantly a measure of how fast you're growing. My employer has doubled in size over the last three years, so even if literally zero people had ever left the company we'd have a median tenure of three years.

> Now, it's understandable why they're using an inappropriate metric. It's the only thing they can even remotely reliably derive from their data set of scraped Linkedin profiles.

I don't think even that is true.

They could do a better metric like "Among the employees that were employed by company X ten years ago, what percentage are still employed there?"

This also solves the "average tenure at a growing company" problem.

Yeah, it was strange seeing Apple have shorter average retention than Amazon. Maybe Apple is just much much better about keeping employees from publicly complaining.

I’m not sure about the methodology here… Apple has a huge retail workforce that almost certainly plays a role.

ETA: Sort of analogous to Amazon’s warehouse workforce.

I couldn’t find it in the source, but I assume they’re only counting people who _have_ left these companies? Otherwise growing companies with a higher percentage of newer employees would be heavily penalized.

Yes but something fishy about methodology. Wells Fargo & Comcast on the list for high retention?

I think it’s actually indicative that people get a lot of talent on their resume that they can get poached or move into other roles in the industry.

I think it's generally the opposite, and the rankings kind of validate my general model of companies.

There's a continuum of "good/bad" to customers & "good/bad" to employees, and companies are rarely good to both.

Some of the most popular consumer facing brands are terrible places to work. One cynical reason may be that they know there is an unlimited supply of bushy tailed workers ready to replace you once they exhaust your will to live. Another less cynical reason might be that to create the best products requires the hardest work, most competition, and generally it burns people out.

It's worth going into the interview process understanding the risk/reward profile. Some companies are high stress & turnover, but at least pay you for the hazard. Others not so much.

Anecdotally, very few people left during my tenure there. I stayed for over 5yrs myself, and I met several people who had been there for 10+ years.

Maybe the short short average tenure time is because of the retail employees.

Do Kenyans that classified data for chatGPT count or are they all well paid? What kind of jobs are these?

Because those employees have lots of options.

It's a bit philosophical, but generally most people want to leave their current employer. That is evidenced by how most people take retirement as soon as they can, instead of staying on the job even after they could retire. This shows that people who don't leave their jobs, stay only because there's currently nothing better for them out there - it doesn't matter if they live in small town with a ConocoPhillips factory, or in the middle of NYC.