Dan Luu
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Attrition
🕑 Added 2017-07-21 02:46:40 +0000 UTC I find that most people think it’s normal for companies to have 20% attrition per year. This seems quite odd to me and I think that 20% attrition should at least be a yellow flag.I once worked at a company where people were mostly happy, and the attrition rate was roughly 5% a year. I think about half of that was involutionary, which puts the voluntary attrition rate as roughly 2.5% a year. That’s the rate at which people left because they wanted to change industries, or because they married someone who had a job that tied them elsewhere, or because they wanted to move back home to a place like Sweden. Attrition above and beyond that base rate could have been prevented one way or another.
The company didn’t have a “trick”. It just paid somewhat above average for the market and went to great lengths to make the company a great place to work. I don’t think you even have to go that far -- Photoshelter had similar attrition rates before Mark Yun left without paying above market, and Automattic also has similar attrition despite not paying above market.
My cynical opinion on this is that it’s so rare to find a place that isn’t highly dysfunctional[0] that, when people find one, they tend to stay a long time. This also explains why people find high attrition rates, like 10% or 20%, to be totally normal.
[0]: https://danluu.com
