While I think the data is good, the conclusion of "don't want" is downright silly to me, because if you look at all the top contenders, "don't have any better options" seems like a better interpretation to me.

If you work at Apple (company with the shortest tenure), then you likely have tons of other options, and can job hop your way into higher and higher comp. If you work for one of the giant oil companies, where else are you going to go (generally, of course this doesn't apply to everyone equally)? This is especially true in many places where oil and gas jobs are the only working class jobs that pay well.

Edit: other good comment also pointed out that Apple has a huge retail workforce that would definitely bring down the average tenure.

> "don't have any better options" seems like a better interpretation to me.

This is certainly the case for a company like Lockheed Martin. I used to live in an insular area where defense contracting was by far the dominant area of employment; although you could hop from one contractor to another you ended up having a very finite career progression because each of these companies were all competing for the same contracts which all had the same rules regarding how much they can pay employees. Staying at one such company for a decade isn't particularly uncommon because all of the others offer practically the same benefits and pay. Although the government periodically updates these rules they haven't kept pace with the market for some time now. Such downward pressure on wages combined with:

- a conservative technical vision that keeps worker skill sets 5-10 years behind industry

- long production timelines owing to slow, broken security and procurement processes (which are merely replicated in a new form every time somebody tries to introduce a streamlined alternative)

- promotions based on seniority and credentials instead of technical acumen and impact (since this is how the government attempts to objectively measure employee value)

- lack of technical rigor in interview processes (because contractors are incentivized to hire anybody remotely capable due to cost-plus-fixed-fee contracts, i.e. the "bodies in seats" mentality)

...results in employee stagnation and the phenomenon that you see in the article. I don't imagine that it's terribly different for large, entrenched interests like oil and freight companies. These are, after all, mature organizations with workforces many orders of magnitude larger than Dunbar's number with a dizzying number of orthogonal incentive structures spread across layers upon layers of middle management. Avoiding these types of issues at scale is obviously difficult - it's just a fact of life.

Yeah, this is simply a chart of worker mobility. I think you nailed that one.

It looks like your mail server's down, if the address listed in your profile is accurate.

Thanks I’ll take a look. For now you can use Twitter DM for anything

It looks like lack of mobility at the top end, but probably another factor near the bottom.

Average tenure is also significantly a measure of how fast you're growing. My employer has doubled in size over the last three years, so even if literally zero people had ever left the company we'd have a median tenure of three years.

The study is garbage.

The metric they're using (average tenure) is not useful for comparing employee retention across companies. E.g. a company that's growing will automatically have a lower average tenure than one that's not growing.

Now, it's understandable why they're using an inappropriate metric. It's the only thing they can even remotely reliably derive from their data set of scraped Linkedin profiles. But when your data is bad, the right thing to do is to just not do the study. Not to write a content marketinb blog post that's so blatantly incorrect that it has to be intentionally dishonest.

> Now, it's understandable why they're using an inappropriate metric. It's the only thing they can even remotely reliably derive from their data set of scraped Linkedin profiles.

I don't think even that is true.

They could do a better metric like "Among the employees that were employed by company X ten years ago, what percentage are still employed there?"

This also solves the "average tenure at a growing company" problem.

I had to look a few times to convince myself they weren't at least using tenure of ex-employees. But I'm not sure they could actually search linkedin that effectively on anything but current employees without hitting monetized APIs, etc.

Looks like they include retail, warehouse, contract, part time, and seasonal workers in their data. Also only includes those with LinkedIn profiles. Kinda makes the conclusions pointless. They are just shooting for viral blog content.

> Methodology & sources

To find out which companies employees don't want to leave in 2023, we analyzed the LinkedIn pages of the top 100 companies in the UK, U.S., Canada and Australia and compared them to see which businesses have the highest average tenure.

First, we collected the top 100 companies by market cap using CompaniesMarketCap.com for the UK, U.S., Canada and Australia. Then we analyzed each company's LinkedIn page and collected the median tenure when available, ranking each business based on its average tenure.

The data of this analysis is correct as of June 2023

LOL, this is the stupidest list I've seen in a long time. Tech sector being very dynamic and full of alternative opportunities clearly creates the short tenure over there. Whereas relatively stagnant industries with fewer job opportunities tend to score highly regarding longest tenure. Projecting this along the axis of job attractiveness is just plain dumb.

Apple being the least tenured certainly breaks the notion that companies with better public images do better at retaining employees.

I’m not sure about the methodology here… Apple has a huge retail workforce that almost certainly plays a role.

ETA: Sort of analogous to Amazon’s warehouse workforce.

I couldn’t find it in the source, but I assume they’re only counting people who _have_ left these companies? Otherwise growing companies with a higher percentage of newer employees would be heavily penalized.

Even discounting the warehouse staff, my general impression is that Amazon is one of the harder FAANGs to work at. People I know who went there mostly didn't last terribly long. The few that did stay all got out of the AWS org very quickly..

Re: Apple, I have a similar but less extreme impression of their engineering org.. but don't know anyone there/from there.

Notice for example MSFT doesn't show up as a high churn shop.

Yeah, “growing”, but they’re kind of filtering by growth because they looked at top 100 by market cap

Yes but something fishy about methodology. Wells Fargo & Comcast on the list for high retention?

Maybe old school companies attract old school employees who exhibit old school retention perhaps?

Whereas the hottest companies attract employees who are more career and development focused who are more likely to switch every few years?

Just guesses though.

Yeah I think high retention is pretty nuanced. I anecdotally know/worked with many blue collar workers who continue to complain about their jobs, have opportunities to swap, and don’t take them.

Anyone with their self-respect left Wells Fargo years ago. Same for Comcast?

Looking at this list I had the same thought a couple of times: maybe "long time employees don't want to leave" is not necessarily the sign of a wholesome company where everyone is happy and content.

I think it's generally the opposite, and the rankings kind of validate my general model of companies.

There's a continuum of "good/bad" to customers & "good/bad" to employees, and companies are rarely good to both.

Some of the most popular consumer facing brands are terrible places to work. One cynical reason may be that they know there is an unlimited supply of bushy tailed workers ready to replace you once they exhaust your will to live. Another less cynical reason might be that to create the best products requires the hardest work, most competition, and generally it burns people out.

It's worth going into the interview process understanding the risk/reward profile. Some companies are high stress & turnover, but at least pay you for the hazard. Others not so much.

Anecdotally, very few people left during my tenure there. I stayed for over 5yrs myself, and I met several people who had been there for 10+ years.

Maybe the short short average tenure time is because of the retail employees.

Yeah, it was strange seeing Apple have shorter average retention than Amazon. Maybe Apple is just much much better about keeping employees from publicly complaining.

I think it’s actually indicative that people get a lot of talent on their resume that they can get poached or move into other roles in the industry.

In addition to the other flaws pointed out in other comments, scraping LinkedIn data will also skew towards longer tenure for companies/industries in which LinkedIn is not a primary recruiting tool, so people don't keep their profiles up to date. I know I have people in my "network" whose profile is listing a job they haven't worked at in a decade.

It’s interesting that the top companies where employees leave often are tech companies. I wonder why this is?

Do Kenyans that classified data for chatGPT count or are they all well paid? What kind of jobs are these?

Because those employees have lots of options.

Would that apply to non tech workers?

For people who work at giant energy and freight companies, or the world's largest tobacco company (the companies at the top of the tenure list), my guess is most definitely no, it doesn't.

Working at a tech giant for 1-4 years and then going off to do your own startup (or jump to another startup) doesn't seem bad in anyway. Different from spending a 20-40 year career at one place, but...

I think this likely has more to have more to do with the culture of the employees at these companies than desirability.

It's a bit philosophical, but generally most people want to leave their current employer. That is evidenced by how most people take retirement as soon as they can, instead of staying on the job even after they could retire. This shows that people who don't leave their jobs, stay only because there's currently nothing better for them out there - it doesn't matter if they live in small town with a ConocoPhillips factory, or in the middle of NYC.

agree with other commenters who point out that the "top" companies are probably not "top" as much as "no other option", but yeah there's no denying this is pretty insane and damning figures for big tech. people don't even want to put in two years? yikes

Even with limitations, pretty interesting - anything like this list for other countries?

Where is the methodology?

Are they including retail and warehouse employees in the numbers?

I wonder how Nintendo, Valve and FromSoftware does.