

Ask HN: How bad is the employee turnover at Amazon for SDEs in Seattle? - Flopsy


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TheAdamist
A friend of mine who just left amazon said that the average tenure was only 18
months. He had been there 2.5 years at the time which is way longer than the
rest of the folks he worked with.

Which sounds insane to me.

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brucehart
Did your friend share any reasons why the turnover is so high? I've heard
Amazon pays well and it seems like there would be interesting work to do.

Is the environment bad or do people just find it easier to move up to better
jobs at different companies once they have some experience with Amazon on
their resume?

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partisan
Anecdotal at best, but from a friend who worked there, I gleaned that the pay
was not particularly good. They were overworked and there was on-call which
came with quite a bit of stress since my friend spent quite a few sleepless
nights on calls. Lastly, it seems there was not a lot of room for advancement.

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chc
The consistent element in every story I've heard from Amazon is that it's
crazy stressful. I get the impression that they've basically made burnout a
corporate value.

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codeonfire
I'm going to say 25%, so the company replaces 10k SDE's every four years at a
cost of $4.5 billion dollars (based on 4x salary replacement cost and 10k
SDEs). Why 4x? There's an army of HR and recruiting people. There's tens of
thousands of interviews. And people don't really start paying off until their
third or fourth year in a new job.

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kasey_junk
I'd love to see a citation on that 3 or 4 year payoff note.

