A new survey has uncovered that out of the top 20 major technology companies in the United States, Apple has the worst staff retention rate, causing employees to leave the company before their second-year work anniversary.
The survey was conducted by resume.io and shows that the median tenure for staff at Apple is just shy of two years at 1.7 years. Amazon and Meta tie for second place with a median term of 1.8 years. Alphabet (Google) has a median tenure of 3.7 years, with Texas Instruments taking the number one spot with a median tenure of 8.4 years in the technology industry.
Shockingly, while Apple is bottom of the list of technology companies in the United States, the company is also last among nearly the top 100 companies in the country. Meta scores a slightly higher median tenure at 1.8 years, with energy and utilities company ConocoPhillips scoring the highest at 10.6 years.
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Apple was previously lauded as having a solid corporate retention strategy, focusing on professional development and offering generous bonuses and benefits. The survey notes that when Apple began offering employee stock bonuses, some claimed the attempt “created divisions in the company” and caused many staffers to feel “undervalued” given other workplace issues.
In the last couple of years, Apple has faced renewed challenges from other tech giants, including Meta and Alphabet, in the battle to gain and retain top talents in engineering, machine learning, and product design and development. Several high-profile Apple executives have headed for the exit in recent years, with some heading to government posts, and others migrating to other companies, such as Ford and Disney.
Joe Bass, the former head of software engineering for Apple’s Special Project group working on Autonomous Technologies, left to join Meta in January 2022. Bass is now the Director of Technical Program Management for generative AI at the social media giant, according to his Linkedin profile.
In another high-profile departure, Mark Bozon, a former top-brass gaming executive from Apple, was recruited by Disney early last year to join its metaverse project. Bozon was at Apple for over 12 years and was a key figure in the launch and growth of Apple Arcade.
Ian Goodfellow, Apple’s former director of machine learning, resigned from the company over its policy requiring employees to return to the office. Several weeks later, Goodfellow joined Alphabet subsidiary DeepMind.
Bloomberg‘s Mark Gurman noted the “unprecedented” exodus of top-brass officials from the Cupertino tech giant in a March 2023 edition of his Power On newsletter. Gurman pointed to an increasingly bureaucratic work environment, internal politics, and reallocation of resources as some of the factors leading to recent departures.
