There’s a lot of speculation in this article. The author’s main point seems to be that people with experience operating aws systems are leaving and points to the 60% “regretted attrition” number as evidence. AWS is like 20 years old at this point. I don’t think it is reasonable to expect experienced people to stick around forever. Nor does a 60% “regretted attrition” rate really mean anything to me. This is related to experienced people leaving. If you think about it if your company does a halfway decent job hiring people you will not want to lose the people you hire. So almost any attrition will be regretted. It’s not a sign of anything.
One thing I have heard that is the average tenure at Amazon is less than 2 years. I suppose this begs the question “how many experienced people do you need?” and what the distribution of tenures actually is but in any case you would want some senior and experienced people to train some junior people and for those junior people to stick around long enough to gain some experience and become senior and train some more junior people. So if THAT is broken I can imagine it leading to this “brain drain” scenario. But this article doesn’t give any evidence of that.
There’s a lot of speculation in this article. The author’s main point seems to be that people with experience operating aws systems are leaving and points to the 60% “regretted attrition” number as evidence. AWS is like 20 years old at this point. I don’t think it is reasonable to expect experienced people to stick around forever. Nor does a 60% “regretted attrition” rate really mean anything to me. This is related to experienced people leaving. If you think about it if your company does a halfway decent job hiring people you will not want to lose the people you hire. So almost any attrition will be regretted. It’s not a sign of anything.
One thing I have heard that is the average tenure at Amazon is less than 2 years. I suppose this begs the question “how many experienced people do you need?” and what the distribution of tenures actually is but in any case you would want some senior and experienced people to train some junior people and for those junior people to stick around long enough to gain some experience and become senior and train some more junior people. So if THAT is broken I can imagine it leading to this “brain drain” scenario. But this article doesn’t give any evidence of that.