Are we really losing engineers faster than we hire them?
Golden turns one employee roster into attrition rates, exit reasons, a quarterly headcount bridge and pay-band spreads, so the answer comes with numbers attached.
Two asks, one roster
Lena is Head of People. Engineering leads say people are walking out the door, and Finance wants a headcount bridge for the board pack by the end of the week.
All she has is a list of everyone ever hired, with a hire date and maybe a termination date. Turning that into headcount by quarter usually means a pile of COUNTIFS and a lot of second-guessing.
One roster, two shapes
Golden keeps the roster as is for rates, box plots and tenure. One unpivot step in Prepare turns hire and termination dates into a single event timeline for the waterfall.
Attrition is computed the way your CFO expects: exits in the period over average headcount across it.
How Golden answers it
Rank departments by attrition
A bar chart of H1 2025 attrition by department. Engineering stands alone at the top. Duplicate it for H2 2024 and the jump is obvious.
See why they left
A 100% stacked bar of termination reason by department. Compensation fills half of the Engineering bar and a sliver everywhere else.
Build the headcount bridge
A waterfall of net change by quarter, opening at 1,423 people. The running total carries the baseline, so the last bar lands on real ending headcount. A pivot table puts hires and exits side by side for Finance.
Check the pay bands
A box plot of salary by job level, computed over every employee. L3 has the tallest box by far, because it mixes senior ICs and first-line managers.
Look at tenure
A one-year-bin histogram shows two humps: 0 to 2 years and 6 to 8 years, with a trough at 4 to 5.
Yes, it spiked. Here's where.
- 01Engineering attrition hit 14.2% in H1 2025 (82 exits), up from 4.9% in each half of 2024. The rest of the company held at 4.9%.
- 0241 of those 82 exits cite Compensation, then Personal (15) and Career Growth (13).
- 03L3 salaries span $82,000 to $178,000 with a $47,500 interquartile range; L1's is $8,000.
- 04Headcount grew from 1,423 at the start of 2024 to 1,959 by June 2025.
Into the board pack
Run Explain Change on Engineering exits between H2 2024 and H1 2025: Compensation is the driver, and L3 carries most of it. Forecast quarterly terminations to size the backfill budget.
Generate a data story for the board that names the department, the reason and the quarter, and export the bridge to Google Sheets so Finance can paste it into their model.
Answer the attrition question this week
Bring your roster and get to the why before the board meeting.