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.
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?
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.
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.
The mandatory 24/7 on-call support for your group, (week or two at a time, every month?) is a huge negative. My friends groups product was for mainly normal working hours professionals on the west coast so he didnt get the crazy all night shenanigans that other groups had.
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.
Which sounds insane to me.