How much time do we stay in a company ?

Hello, I'd just like to know if you have any good statistics concerning this question :

What is the average time a developer stays in the same company ?

I'm asking this question because I often get the feeling that developers don't stay too long in the same company, but I'd like to know if there are any statistics I could look to find out whether this feeling is true or not (and to what extent it is far or near from the truth).

I'm more interested in statistics where the developer chose to left (i.e had the choice to stay but decided to leave, wasn't fired or the company went bankrupt or something of the same kind).

I thought this would be the best place to get some answers, and I'd like to know if you would by chance have any resource I could look upon.

Also, on a related note, am I the only one with this feeling or is it something other people here think as well ?

Thank you for your time.

PS : I'm not a native speaker, please feel free to correct my mistakes in this post.

Comments

[Grzegorz Ziemonski]

Without taking too much to research further, the yearly StackOverflow survey can give you some interesting insights into the topic.

Having spent almost 3 years (the anniversary is in just 3 days!) in the same company for now, I can say that there are many different factors that can make you want to stay (or leave):

• in the beginning, I was super happy about my salary and I was learning A LOT
• then, despite some good offers from the financial perspective, I decided to stay, because I was afraid of working with old, dirty, legacy code
• as my fear of legacy stuff went away, I was kept by the great people that I had around me, who inspired me both professionally and personally
• after moving to Spain some months ago, which physically split me from my old team, I think the last thing that holds me here (for now) is the interesting stuff that I got to work on recently (recommendation systems)

[Jonathan SIMONNEY]

completely missed the survey! Thank you very much for the source. (I don't know how representative it is of the reality of software development, but it indeeds give some interesting insights).

Thanks for sharing your employment interest progress.

[protium]

Maybe the answer is not a discrete amount of time.
The factors that made me leave a company were:

Getting bored because the tasks I have
Feeling stuck in my career (not learning new things)

I think you could work in the same company for 10 years and you will feel really good because you like every aspect of it. But if something triggers in your mind the idea to leave you have to look up for all the reasons. Time could be one but is always a consequence of other feelings.

[Jonathan SIMONNEY]

Thank you for the answer, but I don't ask that because I intend to leave my company, but rather because I like to put some objective numbers on feelings / preconceived ideas I have about our industry (and I'd like to know if I am the only one with these ideas, because I often read posts of people leaving / having left their job).

As for the time spent, I thought if it wasn't an almost immediate leave (like before one year or something like it), it could also be that people wanted to try something new, not to stay forever in the same company (no matter how great it was), and sometimes to build their own product.