You quote the annual age-adjusted rate for regular people. What's the rate among startup employees? Surely in startups where the future is particularly highly uncertain, employees feel a lot more pressured than those in boring companies. Ceteris paribus, why would the suicide rate be the same as that of the regular folks?
I think you would need to do a subtler analysis before commenting in the condescending way you did.
You misunderstand. I'm not taking a position on whether or not the OP's hypothesis was reasonable or not. All I'm saying is that before you take a position you ought to at least do some basic homework.
A fair point. But did they have 800 employees for all of those 10 years? (I don't actually know the answer to that. I'm not taking a position on whether or not the OP's hypothesis is reasonable or not. I don't know. The only thing I'm saying is that before you take a position on a question like this you ought to at least do some basic homework.)
For anyone curious, the base rate of at least one person committing suicide based on these numbers is `1-((1-(13.42/100,000))^800) = 10%`. I suspect the suicide rate for engineers (who tend to be white, middle-upper class men) is somewhat different from the national average so take these numbers with a grain of salt
You’re right; upper middle class white males are the most vilified and attacked and hated class of people in the world for whatever reason; I wonder if this makes that demographic more prone to suicide.
Men are nearly 4x more likely to commit suicide than women, and "white" is 1.5-2x higher than other races [0], so while I'm not seeing combined stats it's pretty certain that that combination is higher than the general population.
You might want to read again the numbers you just posted and change your tone to a less self assured one, because you're very obviously wrong. Theranos operated for more than ten years with hundreds of employees, so the numbers you posted confirm the gp's point.
Maybe it's just the way I look at the world, but I find it ~beautiful in a way when instances of the very phenomenon discussed in an article can be found within discussions on the article.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_in_the_United_States
from which we learn that:
"The annual age-adjusted suicide rate is 13.42 per 100,000 individuals."
Doing the math to figure out how plausible it is that "one suicide in 800 might be within the normal base rate" is left as an exercise.