That's because whatever statistic you pulled doesn't account and adjust for Google's growth which is massive in the past couple of years. If a majority of employees are new hires, then they haven't been there for 2 years and that drags down the average....
We need to stop repeating these statistics with no context. It's incredibly misleading.
Yep. The attrition rate is not even remotely close to 50%. My recollection was that this turnover rumor started with a stat that at one point in Google's recent growth, the median tenure of the employees was only 2 years. This stat then got interpreted (and then reported) by some as Google having an obscenely high turnover. Of course, you can't get turnover rate from median tenure, they're completely different things.
If the size of a company doubles in a year, the median tenure will be <=1yr.
If the most junior employees of another company start quitting en mass, the median tenure for the remaining employees will actually increase.
Median tenure is a completely useless in determining how many people are leaving a company.
Except, usually, when these stats are published, they don't calculate, say, the average tenure of everyone who left in the past year. Instead, it calculates, how long has everyone who is currently there been there for. This results in ridiculously large numbers for companies like Kodak and GM, but incredibly low numbers for companies that are growing fast.
Yes that's what he means. You'll find that Google actually seems to rank pretty well in turnover (longer time spent at a single company is good) compared to other countries companies in it's industry.
