>Also, Google's median tenure of <1 year was due to hiring, not employees leaving
Google would have to be growing at >300% per year for this math to make sense.
But even if it's 3 years ({X} doubt), that's still cartoonishly low for a hiring process that drags on for months and months.
>I think if you look at companies like Citadel, which routinely fire the bottom 10% as part of the job description
Almost all tech companies target firing/pushing out a considerable percentage of employees per year. It actually is incredibly common, even if it usually doesn't make the news. They used to do it overtly via stack ranking, but now they just do it more quietly. Microsoft punted 2000 "low performers" in the first two months. Brutal firings with zero severance, immediate cancellation of health coverage, etc.
Just to do the math for you, a 1 year average tenure would be a doubling of company size per year without any attrition, not a 300% increase. Google "exponential distribution." With attrition, you get there pretty fast. Also, the statistic you quoted comes from ~2012 IIRC, which was a period of explosive growth at Google.
> Almost all tech companies target firing/pushing out a considerable percentage of employees per year.
Not firing, but managing out. It's very different culturally.
>just to do the math for you, a 1 year average tenure would be
The guy I replied to did say median tenure (where I was talking about mean or average tenure), so relative to a median tenure sure, doubling the staff would do that.
But you said average, in which case no that isn't true. Google is a 26 year old company. If you randomly distributed tenures across a hypothetical employee base (1-26 years), it would take something like 1200% growth to get the average tenure under 2 years. And of course Google's actual employee count growth rate over the past decade and a half is more in the range of 12%, so a couple of factors off for that.
Even when people say the average tenure is 3 -- doubtful -- that still requires an insane level of turnover for a company growing so slowly, relatively, and being so old.
Google would have to be growing at >300% per year for this math to make sense.
But even if it's 3 years ({X} doubt), that's still cartoonishly low for a hiring process that drags on for months and months.
>I think if you look at companies like Citadel, which routinely fire the bottom 10% as part of the job description
Almost all tech companies target firing/pushing out a considerable percentage of employees per year. It actually is incredibly common, even if it usually doesn't make the news. They used to do it overtly via stack ranking, but now they just do it more quietly. Microsoft punted 2000 "low performers" in the first two months. Brutal firings with zero severance, immediate cancellation of health coverage, etc.