The departures come at a time when Google is in transition, its becoming "old." Having worked there between the time it exited its giddily irresponsible teen years to the start of its midlife crisis, I recognized the symptoms. What was humorous to me was that I lived through that the first time at Sun (at Sun 10 years) from Sun just going public to the point where they were struggling with their identity. And for much of that time Eric Schmidt was either my boss, or my boss' boss. 'one hop' in the food chain as it were. At Google I mentioned to Eric that we'd been in this movie before :-) He pointed out the numbers were a lot bigger in the picture on this go round. From what I hear from friends who have left after I did, the movie is playing out the same way.

The last group I was in at Sun was the Java group that later was the core of JavaSoft. It had been populated with low employee number 'refugees' as one of them put it. A number of folks certainly had enough money to not work if they chose to. But an interesting thing happens.

When you suddenly have enough money in the bank so that you can quit when ever you want, you lose your fear of losing your job and trying to find another. And not having that fear to hold you back, can be tremendously empowering.

This was one of the messages in the movie Office Space which is sometimes expressed as 'Work like you don't need to work.'

The change is both subtle and dramatic. People stand up for things they value rather than things they think they should support. They sometimes stop everything they are doing to spend a couple of months to help a promising new employee get their bearings and become effective. They push back on schedule fantasies with hard nosed realities, they tell upper management when things are borked or when they are making bad calls. When you don't care if you get fired, as long as your a reasonably principled person, you can become immensely more effective.

And you learn is that it isn't that you don't like work, its that you don't like bogus things that get in your way at work. Nearly every single person I know who has 'retired' it really meant they stopped reporting to someone else and instead invested their time and energy into things they were passionate about and could make a big impact on. Sure pretty much everyone takes some time off to just breathe and think three related thoughts in succession, but once decompressed from the demands of that large organization, they engage in their vision with diligence and passion. Because of that I am not at all surprised when people who became financially independent at a company continue to work there for many more years. How they work changes, and sometimes what they work on changes, but making things happen is a powerful drug.

As for the median thing, my experience is that people I've interviewed have short stints with longer stints in the middle, so they go job A -> B -> C then at job D they find someone or something to keep their attention and work there for a longer time 5, 6, 10 years then move on. My cycle time seems to be 5 to 10 years but its really an individual thing.