“Developer half-life” is a rough term for how long, on average, it takes for someone at that company to burn out and quit (technically, for the quit-rate for a given cohort to be 50%). It’s possible to get salary data from places like glassdoor, salary.com, etc. but sometimes I wish there was a way to get this metric too. During my tenure at NYTD it seemed like the senior engineering people tended to last two, maybe three years before moving on to greener, less stressful pastures. I made it to about two and a half years. Some shops it’s more, some places it’s less, but it seems there are constants of organizational behavior that are relatively invariant and add up to a “fuck you, I’m out” at predictable intervals for everyone in a given cohort. Like radioactive decay, it’s a random process that still has a certain mechanistic predictability to it in aggregate (really hoping I’m remembering the science right there; it’s been a long time). I sometimes wonder what it might be like to work at a place where people reach “escape velocity” and orbit forever without tracing an eventual bright trail back down the gravity well of demoralization.
(I should footnote here that I’m reasonably happy with my current gig. The only thing that bugs me about the company doesn’t have much to do with them, just that we’re in a soulless office park with no particularly good lunch options around. On the other hand, I’ll take “management I don’t want to throw off the 8th floor” over “the cafeteria serves excellent sushi” any day of the week.)
Conversely, as engineering management, it pays huge dividends to keep an eye on your average tenure because recruiters are screamingly expensive and finding good people is hard — all the moreso if you have a reputation (*cough* Zynga. EA. ShitiGroup.) for being a meatgrinder for technical talent — to say nothing of the harder to quantify long-term benefits of organization continuity. I haven’t progressed far enough up the ladder to be managing managers yet, but if/when I do, you can bet I’ll notice if turnover under manager A is 0% for a given year and 60% for manager B.