Why Are Google Employees So Disloyal?

"A lack of employer loyalty is a defining feature of Generation Y."

Before attempting such overarching explanations, try simpler ones first: It's very easy to change jobs in the Valley due to (i) neutron star -like tech company density and (ii) a social graph that has an unnaturally large number of connections. Both of these stem from how the place got started. Compare the churn rates with, say, Chicago, and you'll see that they are quiet different.

The other important point that this (brain dead) article does not consider is the high rate of learning you experience at these companies. Working at a top company like Google or Facebook or like getting a MS, in perhaps half the time. If you work on the right projects and you pay attention, you can gain tremendous insider knowledge in less than a year, which increases your marketability. Then the salary/position you've been hired for may not be applicable any more.

I went to a job interview last year (at a trendy SF-type start-up) during which the interviewer boasted, "We have amazing catered dinners every night at 7pm." To some, that may sound like a perk. To me, it sounded like late nights. That was actually the red-flag that convinced me I was a bad fit for their culture (despite otherwise having really complementary domain knowledge/skills).

Though I'm not sure how much of that anecdote applies to Google, it's still worth noting that not all perks are interpreted as such by employees.

Most smart people are ambitious and they want to make a high impact on the world. Such people will always want to move on to a position where they can make important decisions about the direction of product and technology - no, we are not talking about which build system to use (gyp? cmake?) or whether the usb protocol should be text based or binary based. Whilst these are important, people want to make decisions like "should chrome os be killed and replaced with android?", "what's the next most important feature required for android?" and so on. Things that change the future of technology.

A company can provide only limited positions for such decision making. So, people move on to startups where they hope their thoughts will shape the future in a big way (future of technology or future of company). Note that this is regardless whether these people are any good at decision making outside their tech expertise. Today's low bootstrap cost startup world makes it possible for them to find out. And that's what they do.

I still don't get why people are attached to the concept of company loyalty in the first place. Maybe it made sense back in the era where you'd work for a company for 2+ decades and retire on a pension, but we don't live in that world anymore.

Loyalty is earned, not implicitly deserved. There are thousands of companies out there where a software engineer can show up, do quality work, and draw a salary and benefits. The fact that a company like Google happens to have an on-site masseuse or slightly better 401k plan doesn't really mean anything at all; there are way bigger factors to consider: work/life balance, healthy management and corporate structure, good project planning, opportunities for personal growth, etc.

A company that big tends to have a lot of project churn and waste, too, so it's not unnatural for some of that churn and waste to result in more people leaving than might be the average at a smaller company.

When you recruit straight from universities and try to give the air of being some sort of continuation of university (all those perks that are designed to make people stay on campus as long as possible and/or make people fresh from college feel at home. It really seems like the only thing they are missing are the dorms...), then perhaps you should expect some of your employees to eventually start "graduating".

> Google is known for its rigorous entry testing: Potential new recruits are asked trick questions like "How many golf balls do you think will fit into a school bus?"

That is a stupid myth, nobody asks these questions, at least it's not for software engineers.

The article makes a false assumption that perks are what keeps you at a company. I'd say that they're nice things to have and definitely work as great recruitment tools. However, if the work you're doing is boring, no amount of free food will make up for that.

We (people working in the software industry) are extremely lucky that we can jump around and work on pretty much whatever we want. I've only been out of uni for three years and I've got to make slot machines, car sharing platforms, mobile apps and transportation apps.

So, if you have the opportunity to basically go do whatever you want, why wouldn't you take it? It's certainly not going to last forever

I stopped reading at "Potential new recruits are asked trick questions like "How many golf balls do you think will fit into a school bus?"

Judging from the number of job ads where companies and recruiters tout their principals as "former Googlers" or "Stanfords," or "Facebookers," this would seem to be a petard upon which Google et al have hoisted themselves through their corporate branding via their "smart" hiring practices. That branding is transitive, but it winds up fomenting a kind of credibility bubble among those they hire.

Or, "Why can't Google retain talent?"

Or, "Average Googler works 4 years; stockholders see consistent gains."

I struggle to find the author's point. By the title alone, this tenure seems to be some vice of Google and tech in general. Furthermore, it's an indictment of an entire class of workers.

Is Exxon really that much better a company than Google? It must be, because the employees stick around for 2 more years!

Google, as a company, still changes entirely over a four year period. That average tenure sees through a whole generation. I could write an article claiming it to be the defining characteristic of a successful company.

This is as good as gossip.

I can't find the original posting of it, but there was a blog post written a couple of years ago by someone who "didn't want to spend the rest of [their] career finding new ways to get people to click ads".

I wonder if this feeling applies not just to Google Adsense/Adwords team, but ultimately to other Google products, many of which are essentially ways to get people to click ads.

Did they separate the turnover numbers for those above the Real Googlers line vs everyone else?

I would expect very different numbers between those two groups.

I remember listening to an interview Marissa Mayer (now CEO of yahoo!) from I believe the audio book: In The Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives.

Amazon Link: http://www.amazon.com/In-The-Plex-Google-Thinks/dp/145587572...

She told the interviewer (I believe Steven Levy) that they train future managers by sending them all around the world and spending a ridiculous amount on each one, but they only expect one of every five or six to be there within three years. They want those type of people because they are ambitious and they want the Google ideology everywhere so they are happy to do it. Essentially, even if you can only get an employee for a year, Google usually highers the best and brightest so they'll probably achieve great things AND when they move on there will still be a connection to Google (and spread Google ideology).

Also, from the ex-Google employees I have talked to they don't feel they can make a big enough difference and would rather join a startup. That's probably because they vet the applicants so well to get ambitious individuals they end up losing them because they want to start or join a new company to both make more money and make a larger impact.

Hopefully the people google hire are smart enough to know that there os no such thing as loyality towards employees in business and as a direct consequence there should be none from employees toward businesses, once a better offer is availeble.

Too many people are making the assumption that this is the new normal, or has something to do with the morals of a group of people.

Instead, it is simply a market at work. Right now there are too few highly skilled programmers and too many job openings. Exacerbating the effect is cheap capital which allows companies to keep raising salaries.

When the market shifts, which it invariably will, hiring will slow and average tenure will increase.

Link bait! The author doesn't truly answer the question in the title and even worse, the author throws a whole generation of people under the bus, so to speak. There is no balance to the explanation as it is one-sided with the employees to blame. Find me a corporation (that still exists) that is truly loyal to its employees... The author needs to read Richard Wolff.

When was the last time a corporation was "loyal" to its employees?

Apparently, one moves up the pay ladder faster by job-hopping.

Why should I be loyal to a company? What benefit is it to me? I can not expect the same from them, why should they expect it from me?

It's not entirely clear whether or not they're counting contractors and those in traditionally high turnover roles like support and commissions-based remote sales.

If the turn over for technical staff is indeed greater than industry and location average (and I suspect it isn't), then I think the reason is a bit simpler than most suspect: especially with less experienced engineers (0-3 years out of university), working for a company like Google quickly builds more career capital (as a result of strong engineering culture, social proof, ability to do fairly unique work, etc...) as opposed to same length stay elsewhere. In other words, it becomes easier for many to go elsewhere if they seek greater responsibility, better projects, flexibility (e.g., being able to work remotely full time), equity/salary, to move from SDET or SRE to a pure software engineering role, to get a position at a growing company that would have previously passed on them, and so forth...

While I'm inclined to believe commentators promotion mechanisms on Google's technical ladder could be improved (and I am sure this is something Google is working to improve continuously), I don't necessarily think this kind of turnover is unhealthy. If a great person leaves and it's apparent to everyone that they've been overlooked and Google should have promoted them before they attempted to resign, it helps show a pattern of what kind of workers are overlooked; if a person leaves and the opposite is true (e.g., they weren't performing in a way that warranted a promotion, they weren't technically qualified to take on a project of their choice, etc...) then it serves a safety mechanism: those unhappy with their role leave -- meaning the average worker is happier with their role than otherwise.

Probably they cannot feel fulfilled professionally in the current company. I heard that some took the entrance to Google to earn the title "former Google engineer" and then get better positioning for investment.

Once systems get as large as the ones at Google, it can feel like the piece of the puzzle you are working on is inconsequential. This leads to boredom and ennui. There are currently a lot of opportunities to get paid well while feeling like you are making a bigger impact on the direction of a company, or simply just have the opportunity to create something from scratch. I often wonder if Google will turn into a place where older engineers go to "retire" with a stable job if their stints at startup companies never work out.

Median time in position means that if a company hires a lot, it goes down. For example Amazon was high on this list, but anyone who's been to Seattle lately knows they are hiring like mad. I think you need some kind of metric that accounts for recent hires. Maybe some of those recent hires will leave in a year or two, but some of them won't.

"The median employee tenure at Google is just more than one year, according to the payroll consultancy PayScale."

Can someone confirm this? I know friends at Google and follow work from Googlers who contribute to standards, and no one I know there fits this description.

This article isn't even about Google. The title is for linkbait and page views. Bershidsky should stick to writing about Russian affairs, not conventional "wisdom" generalizations about the "latest" trends in technical employment.

They're allowed to think out-of-the-box http://googleblog.blogspot.in/2006/05/googles-20-percent-tim...

> In one recent ranking of companies with the highest employee turnover rates, the Mountain View, California, company is among the leaders. The median employee tenure at Google is just more than one year, according to the payroll consultancy PayScale.

Let me ask: does these numbers reflect only employees quitting, or does it also reflect the employee leaving the company on the corp's initiative (getting fired)? If it is the latter, then only talking about employee loyalty seems like a pretty big jump to a flawed conclusion.

As an aside: I've heard that many American jobs have at-will employment. Working for someone that can fire me at any time for any reason doesn't really inspire loyalty in my mind.