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> "Non-regrettable" attrition means either that the person was fired or laid off.

Unless that's a technical/industry term, I assumed it additionally means people who quit, but the company did not mind seeing them go. That is, their performance was only fine-ish, maybe not down to the level where they'd get fired, but also not at a level where their departure would be lamented by their manager.

I don't think the methodology is completely standard, but you generally want an objective way to differentiate between the two forms of attrition. One way to do it is to define non-regrettable as having documented performance or behavioral issues at the time they decided to leave. Another way would be to do talent surveys to get an evaluation ahead of time.

You are correct. That's exactly how I've always seen it used in industry.

It also implies company wouldn't let them back in with a boomerang.

That's right.

It's common to distinguish the two.

E.g. a sales rep is underperforming and decided to leave. The decision at time of termination was technically the employee's (not fired, not laid off), but the company would not seek to retain or rehire.

In companies with good communication and clear incentive structures, this is a somewhat common occurrence, as employees realize there is not a good opportunity for them.

I took it to be that their contract just didn’t get extended.

Not fired, not laid off, just not continued past some initially agreed upon end date.

Yeah, and any manager will do their best to mark anyone they can as non-regrettable because a manager isn't gonna last long if their good employees are the ones leaving.

Is 2.9% and 6.8% acceptable or even 'good' levels, even for the tech industry? I'm not quite sure. A 6.8% performance-related quit/termination seems pretty high from my limited anecdotal experience.

Edit: now that I'm thinking about it, I don't think I worked at a tech company where people were fired/asked to resign more than 2.5x than those that resigned on their own.

You can steer attrition by so many parameters - compensation, (non) promotion, change in benefit plans.

And again, a "non-regrettable" termination can also apply when the employee quit.

Another trick: In order to avoid being on notice as a manager because too many people under you quit, just declare it "non-regrettable".

"Non-regrettable" just means the company wasn't too sad to see them go, not that they were necessarily forced out. They could've been a poor performer that found another job on their own, and they wouldn't want to rehire them.

> Is 2.9% and 6.8% acceptable or even 'good' levels, even for the tech industry?

I would put 2.9% at the very good to low level. It suggests 100% turnover every 33 years, which is fine, especially for the tech industry.

6.8% for performance strikes me as an indicator of very bad hiring and/or onboarding. A charitable view would be that many years of bad hiring got dumped in one year (so each year only had a small % of bad hires), but I wonder if that was the actual case.

2.9% would be excellent if sustained. It would correspond to keeping a significant majority of the employees you want to keep for more than 10 years. That's generally quite rare.

I'm less clear on how to assess the 6.8%. It seems somewhat significant, though if you're hiring many people, that's a period where you might expect churn, as some of them don't work out.

Of course, you can't extrapolate any of this, as 2023 was a year when employees would be very averse to moving, and it was also a year when many companies were coming off of previous hiring sprees. So expect the 2.9% to eventually increase.

Most large companies aim for ~10% total turnover a year.

> "Non-regrettable" attrition means either that the person was fired or laid off. Since the post says Automattic didn't do layoffs, that means all of that attrition took the form of being fired because of performance problems.

> If 7% of the company exited the company in a year because they were fired -- which seems quite high to me -- then even if you don't call it a layoff, it has many of the same characteristics as a layoff.

In my experience, this will have a way worse effect on morale than layoffs and will trigger regrettable attrition, as the smarter people in the room realize that you're always one reorg away from having a 'performance problem'. Sad.

This. The more you reorg the less confidence I have that management knows shit.

Isn’t it the other way around? If you’re a decent performer you should be more afraid of random layoffs (like FAANG in the past 2 years) than performance based layoffs.

Not necessarily. When it comes to someone's livelihood, 'performance' is subjective. Have you ever been involved in employee performance evaluation for stuff like stack ranking? It's very easy to spin a failure as a success or the other way around. Say you're a decent performer and a reorg will make you end up under someone who does not have the same belief, even if by objective metrics they may be wrong. You become a low performer without any chances in your objective performance.

FAANG style random layoffs if done like ripping off the band-aid are not ideal but, in my view, ritualistic performance-based firings are way more draining for the morale of any organization. Not saying that companies should keep low performers onboard, I'm just saying that if you involve the incentive of reducing the number of employees, management will find low performers everywhere and will drive the other employees either into burnout or to their competitors..

You are always one manager away from not being a decent performer and good managers tend to be promoted or leave, sometimes faster than you do.

Not necessarily. Depends on their definition and process.

“Voluntary regrettable” would imply the employee left voluntarily but regrettable because the company would have preferred they stayed.

“Non-regrettable” means they left for reasons that aren’t regrettable such as performance or natural attrition. Either they left on their own or were fired. Hard to say since they don’t specify.

Typically "regretted attrition" is employee managed. "Unregretted attrition" is employeer managed. Regardless of the cause.

Regretted attrition == The employee left and the employer regrets it (They would have wanted the employee to stay)

Unregretted attrition == The employee left and the employer is glad they did. Good riddance.

I’ve also seen people who were good performers but just difficult to work with that were categorized as non-regrettable.

“Hi boss, I’ve got another offer but wanted to give you a chance to counter” -> “Congrats on your new role, why don’t you go ahead and wrap up by Friday? I’ll skip over to HR and get the paperwork handled for you. Do you need a box for personal belongings?”

6.8% seems like a pretty reasonable target for non-regrettable attrition. GE famously aimed at firing the bottom 10% of performers every year. In Facebook engineering management the internal target was 6% IIRC.

It feels a bit paradoxical because there are many 10-person teams with no poor performers that should be fired. Yet if you have an engineering director heading a 150 person department and that department allegedly has no poor performers, that probably indicates a lax culture that accepts poor performance.

> It feels a bit paradoxical because there are many 10-person teams with no poor performers that should be fired.

These bottom-dwellers are often spread out amongst teams so that there is low-hanging fruit on each team.

The conflict happens when multiple managers try to hold on to next year’s sacrificial lamb as well.

> In Facebook engineering management the internal target was 6% IIRC.

I haven't seen a NRA rate enforced at Facebook, however 6% is the target at Amazon.

Doesn't seem unreasonable, as long as it's a soft target and at a large level. When every manager needs to fire one employee every year or two or get fired, it Uber sucks.

Any time a manager needs to fire a performing employee, the company dies a little. You start destroying cooperation, and selecting sociopaths as managers.

> now the remaining workforce has to adjust and "do more with less,"

If those cut were actually low performers, not necessarily. If the attrition was dead weight or worse, incompetent, their good performing peers might do much better since they’re no longer cleaning up someone else’s mess or being demoralized that someone is getting away with doing nothing but still getting paid. The manager of dead weight gains time to be more involved or strategic, peer teams no longer waste time communicating to a useless person, small mistakes stop multiplying, etc.

It’s situational, but I don’t think cutting low performers is a problem if there’s serious performance problems and it’s not just being used as an excuse or being applied blindly like stack ranking.

> "Non-regrettable" attrition means either that the person was fired or laid off.

No. Every leaver is classified as a regrettable/non-regrettable case - this was a part of my last exit interview when I quit the job."non regrettable" just means you have very low chances of being hired by the company again.

This should shed light on what the author meant by those terms: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/how-determine-regrettable-ver...