[HN Gopher] Hey, wait - is employee performance Gaussian distrib...
___________________________________________________________________
Hey, wait - is employee performance Gaussian distributed?
Author : timdellinger
Score : 257 points
Date : 2024-11-25 15:03 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (timdellinger.substack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (timdellinger.substack.com)
| xphilter wrote:
| Yeah good luck. I don't think any hr decisions have ever been
| about data; it's about following norms. If you can get the rand
| corp or heritage foundation to adopt this policy then maybe
| corporations would look into it.
| timdellinger wrote:
| Interestingly enough, I remember in my younger days being
| inspired by Rand Corp's 1950's era game theory work on e.g.
| mutually assured destruction. It later occurred to me that I
| don't need to be employed by a think tank to write think
| pieces!
|
| That being said, I like to think that startups growing into
| large corporations have an opportunity to be better when it
| comes to things like performance management.
| hobs wrote:
| As soon as the market actually incentivizes it, which it
| almost never does, it will get better.
|
| Most of the big companies just throw endless interviews, high
| pressure firings, and a lot of money at the problem and make
| the people below them solve the rest of the problems.
|
| They see how much they are paying for the mess, but any
| medium term effort is torpedoed because of all the other
| things the business focuses on (lack of resources for the
| process and training), and other powerful individuals who
| want to put their own brand on hiring and firing who have
| significantly more ego than sense.
| thrance wrote:
| The Heritage Foundation would probably fire every competent
| employees and replace them with partisan sycophants, like they
| plan to do with America in Project 2025.
| datadrivenangel wrote:
| If you assume that people are promoted to their level of
| incompetence -- terminal responsibility level, then you would
| expect that level adjusted performance should approach a
| Gaussian?
| riehwvfbk wrote:
| No, because there simply aren't enough high-level employees at
| the top in any given company for a meaningful sample. You'd
| have to compare across companies; I guess the stock market does
| that indirectly.
| riazrizvi wrote:
| This is a well constructed empty argument because it glosses over
| the central concern, 'employee performance'. Without defining
| that we have no idea what the graph represents.
| michaelmior wrote:
| I'm not sure this is the argument the author is making, but you
| could claim that the rest of the argument is true for any (or
| most) reasonable measure of employee performance that a company
| actually cares about.
| nradov wrote:
| You could claim anything, but is there hard quantitative data
| to support such a claim? Or are we just guessing?
| michaelmior wrote:
| The author presents some data in the article. Also, the
| absence of hard quantitative data doesn't necessarily make
| it a complete guess. (At least not any more than starting
| with the assumption of a Gaussian distribution.)
| bhickey wrote:
| For analyses like this it just doesn't matter. Pick a metric
| and measure it over your workforce. Across the universe of
| salient metrics of interest you won't see a gaussian across
| your workforce.
|
| In a previous job I modelled this and concluded that due to
| measurement error and year-over-yead enrichment, Welchian rank-
| and-yank results in firing people at random.
| pembrook wrote:
| All of Jack Welch's management tactics should be considered
| suspect now.
|
| His performance at GE was 100% fueled by financial leveraging
| that blew up in 2009, basically killing the company. Nobody
| should be taking management lessons from this guy.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| > Nobody should be taking management lessons from this guy.
|
| Rank and yank is simply about lowering labor costs, once
| the business has achieved a significant moat and no longer
| needs to focus solely on growing revenues. A negotiating
| tool for the labor buyer, due to the continuous threat of
| termination.
| Cheer2171 wrote:
| So you're saying that if you don't think about construct
| validity and just pick any given metric that can spit out a
| comparable number across all your different positions and
| teams, that these metrics have weird distributions? Hmm, I
| wonder why.
| munk-a wrote:
| I think it's more charitable to interpret their statement
| as "for all metrics" rather than "run this experiment once
| and arbitrarily just chose a single metric". Their
| statement is a lot more actionable because as much as we've
| tried to over decades finding an accurate metric to
| represents performance seems to be an impossible task.
|
| A researcher friend at a previous job once mentioned that
| in grad school he and several other students were assisting
| a professor on an experiment and each grad student was
| given a specific molecule to evaluate in depth for fitness
| for a need (I forget what at this point) and one of the
| students had a molecule that was a good fit while the
| others did not - that student was credited on a major
| research paper and had an instant advantage in seeking
| employment as a researcher while the other students did
| not. That friend of mine was an excellent science
| communicator and so fell into a hybrid role of being a
| highly technical salesperson but tell me - what metrics of
| this scenario would best evaluate the researchers' relative
| performance? The outcome has a clear cut answer but that
| was entirely luck based (in a perfect world) - a lot of
| highly technical fields can have very smart people be stuck
| on very hard low margin problems while other people luck
| into a low difficulty problem solution that earns a company
| millions.
| withinboredom wrote:
| Most of the world is ruled by luck. Where you are born,
| who your parents, how rich they are, who you know,
| whether or not someone "better" than you applies for the
| same position, etc. etc.
|
| Ignoring luck or trying to control for it would be a
| mistake.
| munk-a wrote:
| Ignoring luck is a requirement - conditions born from
| luck may be worth consideration but past luck is not a
| predictor of future luck.
|
| I'd clarify - trying to ignore someone's education
| because it's a result of their citizenship or the wealth
| of their family is going to be endlessly frustrating...
| but if your metrics can't exclude luck and happenstance
| during the execution of the task then they're not worth
| much of anything.
| bhouston wrote:
| Stack ranking will tell you when something isn't working, but
| the solution isn't always to fire, but rather use that data
| to fix things in a more general solution.
|
| I found that team composition and role assignment matters a
| lot, at least if you hire people who are at least above a
| certain bar. Match a brilliant non-assertive coder with
| someone who is outgoing and good at getting along and at
| least decent coder, and the results from the two outperform
| generally either of them individually.
|
| You can bring out the best of your employees or you can set
| them up against each other. This either brings everyone up or
| brings everyone down.
| dataflow wrote:
| Wholeheartedly agree with you on team composition mattering
| a ton, but how often do you have such an abundance of
| engineers and tasks that you can match them up the right
| way?
| bhouston wrote:
| I think if you get to know your engineers, you can figure
| out the right pairings to bring out the best. But this
| requires intimate knowledge and probably subjective based
| on how good the manager is at managing coders. So I guess
| from up high, stack ranking-based firing is easier.
|
| But I think it is also cheaper to make great teams rather
| than just doing brutal firings all the time. But it may
| be a micro-optimization?
| timdellinger wrote:
| Oh, the answer to that is apparent enough, but frustratingly
| circular:
|
| Performance is "visibly doing the things that the company
| rewards during the performance review process".
|
| Theoretically, each role at a company should have a set of
| articulated accomplishments that are expected. (This is sadly
| often not the case.)
|
| But you're right that the subjective nature of "performance",
| and the lack of a clear numerical scale, are a difficulty of
| the entire process!
| SideburnsOfDoom wrote:
| It also assumes that "productivity" is something that is
| meaningful at all at the level of individuals, not teams or
| larger. IMHO, it is not.
| mitthrowaway2 wrote:
| The article does briefly caution about measuring difficulties.
| But given that the main conclusion is an argument against
| stack-ranking-and-firing, the question of "what is performance"
| passes forward to whatever metric the stack-ranking manager was
| going to use when they were planning to fire the "bottom" 10%
| of their payroll.
| alphazard wrote:
| You could replace "employee performance" with "value to the
| company" and the same argument would hold. Performance is
| difficult to measure, but we get a good estimate of value to
| the company any time someone receives a competing offer and
| drags their manager to the negotiating table.
|
| The amount of money the manager is willing to match is the
| perceived value to the company. This is how the company
| actually behaves (we know for sure whether they match the offer
| or not) and that behavior implies a value to the company,
| regardless of what anyone says in performance review season.
| dataflow wrote:
| > The amount of money the manager is willing to match is the
| perceived value to the company.
|
| This assumes the manager is irrelevant here. But we all know
| that different managers (or non-managers) can communicate
| value differently for the same employee. So this metric can't
| be solely measuring the value of the employee.
| alphazard wrote:
| You are talking about value as some intrinsic quality. I'm
| talking about value as a belief that is subjectively
| assigned, and that we can infer from actions. We can all
| agree on the actions, and we can agree on the possible
| beliefs that an action can imply.
|
| The action to not match an offer implies that the company
| believes the employee adds less value than their new offer.
| If the company believed the employee was adding more value
| than their new offer, they would match the offer to keep
| the employee.
|
| A company isn't a single rational agent. It's made up of
| people performing different functions. But behaving
| irrationally is a categorically bad thing for the company
| to do, and the leadership has a fiduciary duty to prevent
| the company from acting irrationally or otherwise not in
| its own self interest.
|
| The manager may matter here, but the leadership is supposed
| to be creating a management structure such that the company
| acts rationally to make progress towards set goals.
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| Yes, is performance Pareto, or perception of performance
| Pareto?
| chambers wrote:
| On a meta note, you're right to note that unclear terms
| undermine our collective reasoning, despite a proper chain of
| propositions.
|
| I've found Term Logic[1] to be useful for figuring out why
| certain discussions confuse me. I've also used to avoid
| unnecessary arguments by seeing if the participants are
| starting with clear concepts (signaled by terms).
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Term_logic#Basics also this
| explainer https://adoroergosum.blogspot.com/2015/05/the-three-
| acts-of-...
| nonameiguess wrote:
| It's worth hammering on this point as much as possible hoping a
| few people listen, but there is at least one other important
| point about employee performance. If you're allocating bonuses, a
| single year's performance is probably a good way to do that,
| assuming you can accurately measure it. When you're talking
| retention and promotion, though, you're making a prediction of
| future performance, possibly at a variety of different jobs. That
| is even harder to do and more poorly reflected in the last year's
| results. You have some analogies to sports performance in this
| article, and you see this kind of thing all the time there. Guy
| does great in a single year, gets a huge, possibly long-term
| contract, then tanks. On the other hand, one of the better
| dynasties of the past decade was accomplished by the Golden State
| Warriors in the US NBA thanks to underpaying one of the all-time
| great players in NBA history because he suffered a series of
| ankle injuries early in his career and scared off other suitors.
| Single-year performance isn't necessarily reflective of a
| person's true mean abilities, and their place in the Pareto
| distribution won't be the same at all levels of advancement and
| responsiblity, either.
|
| The problem, from a company's perspective, is you probably need
| to retain everyone at least five years, and actually give them a
| wide variety of assignments in that time, to really get any
| usable data about their long-term prospects.
| stego-tech wrote:
| Literally this. I've been banging on about this my entire
| career, not that corporate leaders tend to listen to the riff-
| raff. _Especially_ in tech companies, they tend to only
| evaluate promotions and raises based on the past half-year of
| work, rather than a repeated pattern of successes across a
| diverse array of tasks and backgrounds over a significant
| period of time (years); even then, you only get the promotion
| if you're on the right team, doing the right work, at the right
| time, and for the right leader. This leads to otherwise stellar
| performers going elsewhere, because the janitors, maintainers,
| and firefighters in an organization never get properly
| rewarded, respected, or recognized by leaders. Said leaders
| pass this off as "bad performers", failing to realize the
| importance of superb talent working on less-than-stellar
| projects that keep the company running efficiently.
|
| The _only_ people who benefit from performance reviews are
| shareholders whose price pops when layoffs happen, and those
| who game the system for their own political ends. Top talent
| never really thrives in these, because they're too busy doing
| actually meaningful and important work.
| hermanradtke wrote:
| > On the other hand, one of the better dynasties of the past
| decade was accomplished by the Golden State Warriors in the US
| NBA thanks to underpaying one of the all-time great players in
| NBA history because he suffered a series of ankle injuries
| early in his career and scared off other suitors.
|
| In case people want to read more about this:
|
| https://www.essentiallysports.com/nba-active-basketball-news...
| timdellinger wrote:
| Interestingly enough, sports salaries are Pareto-distributed,
| which says something about how valuable (as assessed by the
| marketplace) each player is
|
| https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2024/08/go...
| throwaway48476 wrote:
| Setting aside the issue of defining a function for 'employee
| performance', this glosses over the invisible interactions. An
| employee in a dysfunctional organization will perform worse than
| if they were in a well functioning one because they don't have to
| waste time dealing with people and processes that are a
| hindrance.
| dogleash wrote:
| To me the biggest insight here is that no matter what data
| science you're trying to do on a group of employees, the people
| you already have decided should be fired or promoted from that
| group are outliers and should be removed from the sample.
|
| There are certainly times that you would want them included, but
| those can be classified under "budgeting," not gaining insight on
| a workforce.
| ses1984 wrote:
| Doesn't the inclusion or exclusion of these people heavily
| depend on what type of insight you're trying to get out of the
| data?
| bparsons wrote:
| Unless you are measuring the output of people on simple assembly
| lines, it is very difficult to define "performance".
|
| In a properly functioning team, people perform different,
| discrete roles which are probably not entirely understood by
| other team members or management.
| hemloc_io wrote:
| Cool data/idea, and anecdotally lines up with my experiance at
| BigCos from a coworker perspective.
|
| But in my experiance employee perf evals are more political than
| data based.
|
| At the end of the day a lot of mgmt at BigCo, esp these days,
| wants that 10% quota for firing as a weapon/soft layoff and the
| "data" is a fig leaf to make that happen. More generously it's
| considered a forcing function for managers to actually find
| underperformers in their orgs, even if they don't exist. Either
| way it's not really based on anything other than their own
| confirmation bias.
|
| IME the scrutiny of perf evaluation is basically tied to the
| trajectory of the company and labor market conditions. Even
| companies with harder perf expectations during the good times of
| ~2021 relaxed their requirements.
| iambateman wrote:
| As employees, our expectations for performance management come
| from the system of giving grades in school.
|
| What's interesting is that school grades often doesn't follow a
| normal distribution, especially for easier classes. I suspect
| that getting an "A" was possible for 95%+ of students in my gym
| class and only 5-10% of the students in my organic chemistry
| class.
|
| In the same way, some jobs are much easier to do well than
| others.
|
| So we should expect that virtually all administrative positions
| will have "exceptional" performance, which is to say that they
| were successful at doing all of the tasks they were asked to do.
| But for people who's responsibility-set is more consequential,
| even slightly-above average performance could be 10x more
| meaningful to the company.
| nightski wrote:
| Having a shifted mean doesn't mean they aren't a normal
| distribution. Not saying they are necessarily, but the anecdote
| you are providing isn't convincing.
| kurthr wrote:
| Perhaps, but due to the sampling of the distribution you
| would likely never know. If 95% of your samples fit in the
| top 3 bins, you can't say much at all with certainty.
| Poisson, Gaussian, binomial, Boltzmann, gamma...
| marian_ivanco wrote:
| That is not IMHO what he is trying to say, you don't shift
| the distribution, you measure if somebody passed a test. I
| the test is "passable" then one side of "distribution" is at
| least cut off. E.g. it's normal (and sometimes expected) that
| the whole class will pass without issues.
| dowager_dan99 wrote:
| if your scale doesn't have the atomic values at the top end
| to differentiate the data it's not a normal, it's Pareto or
| Zipf or some other power law.
| sokoloff wrote:
| Would "doing all of the tasks they were asked to do" really be
| "exceptional"? What could be exceptional about that? I would
| think it would be "meets expectations" at most.
| dowager_dan99 wrote:
| You don't really need a distribution to measure tasks that
| are binary in nature though, why bother with a Likert scale
| when you can just use a yes/no checklist? I suspect there's
| also a high correlation between the jobs/roles and the
| likelihood of being displaced by machine or otherwise, as
| measuring success is a key problem to be solved when
| "dehumaning" these jobs.
| iambateman wrote:
| I have an issue with this thinking, but I don't mean to pick
| on you...it's common within organizational politics.
|
| Managers suggest that an employee must "go above and beyond"
| their ordinary duties to get an exceptional rating.
|
| But that just means that "going above and beyond" is, in
| fact, a duty. The problem is it's an ill-defined duty which
| is even more susceptible to the whims of what the manager
| thinks counts as "above and beyond." Good managers give clear
| rubrics of performance.
|
| To me, "meets expectations" says that the employee's error
| rate was at acceptable levels and "exceptional" means they
| had almost no errors whatsoever.
| atoav wrote:
| One thing where this analogy stops to work, is that more so
| than in school your performance in a company can be _highly_
| dependent on how well and /or timely others do their job. Your
| managers performance metric may or may not catch that. E.g.
| imagine you are assigned a project where you have to interact a
| lot with department X and now department X is running at/over
| capacity, so _you_ are performing worse, because their part isn
| 't done in time and each back and forth takes half a week. Now
| you spend half your time not being productive with no fault of
| your own and the others are 110% productive while setting the
| whole shop on fire. Based on that metric they should fire you
| and hire more people for department X, when in fact they should
| probably just hire more for them (or reorganize the
| department).
|
| Another example where this analogy stops working is that in
| school the students usually get the same/comparable
| assignments, that is somewhat the point of those. As the goto
| hard-problem-person at my current workplace I am pretty sure
| that it is absolutely impossible to compare my work to the work
| of my collegue who just deals with the bread and butter
| problems, it isn't even the same sport. How would you even
| start doing a productivity comparison here, especially if you
| understand 0 about the problem space
| iambateman wrote:
| Great perspective and I agree. This is the basic reason that
| performance management in an organization is so difficult and
| fraught.
|
| A significant percentage of people in an organization create
| the problems they solve.
| jampa wrote:
| Going through some performance reviews as a manager, I always try
| to push back a bit against the bell curve. It kinda reminds me of
| the "stack ranking.". There are also some factors to be
| considered:
|
| If you are in a hiring freeze or not promoting, most of the curve
| should shift right, assuming you are hiring great people. They
| will probably perform better quarter after quarter. Some might
| counter-argue that if everyone performs better, this should be
| the "new expectation," but I disagree: the market sets
| expectations.
|
| If you have someone at a senior level with expectations of staff,
| for example, they won't be in the company for long. I hired many
| great engineers who later said they only looked for a new job
| because they were never promoted despite being overperformers.
| bhouston wrote:
| I would feel better if this was derived from empirical data
| rather than just rhetoric. This seems super testable, no? There
| is probably a ton of data already in different industries with
| regards to productivity.
|
| Even if human talent have a Pareto distribution (which is not
| clear), the people employed by a company are a selected sub-set
| of that population, which would likely have a different
| distribution depending on how they are selected and the task at
| hand.
|
| I think that any of these simplified distributions are likely not
| generalizable across companies and industries (e.g. productivity
| of AWS or Google employees are likely not distributed like
| employees of MacDonalds or Wal*Mart because of the difference in
| hiring procedures and the nature of the tasks.)
|
| Get hard data within the companies and industry you are in and
| then you can make some arguments. Otherwise, I feel it is too
| easy to just be talking up a sand castle that has no solid
| footing.
| drcwpl wrote:
| Agree with you - although, rhetorically speaking, I have come
| across many instances which the author refers to "of low
| performers are 3x as common as high performers." This is
| unfortunate as I always think do your best, and as Tyler Cowen
| states - Average is Over. So agree it would have been way
| better to use empirical data to back up this claim especially.
| KK7NIL wrote:
| The problem is that intellectual productivity is generally not
| possible to measure directly, so you instead end up with
| indirect measurements that assume a Gaussian distribution.
|
| IQ is famously Gaussian distributed... mainly because it's
| defined that way, not because human "intelligence" (good luck
| defining that) is Gaussian.
|
| If you look at board game Elo ratings (poor test for
| intelligence but we'll ignore that), they do not follow a
| Gaussian distribution, even though Elo assumes a Gaussian
| distribution for game outcomes (but not the population). So
| that's good evidence that aptitude/skill in intellectual
| subjects isn't Gaussian (but it's also not Pareto iirc).
| bhouston wrote:
| > so you instead end up with indirect measurements that
| assume a Gaussian distribution.
|
| 100%. I was going to write something similar.
|
| > If you look at board game Elo ratings (poor test for
| intelligence but we'll ignore that), they do not follow a
| Gaussian distribution, even though Elo assumes a Gaussian
| distribution for game outcomes (but not the population). So
| that's good evidence that aptitude/skill in intellectual
| subjects isn't Gaussian (but it's also not Pareto iirc).
|
| Interesting, yeah, Elo is quite interesting. And one can view
| hiring in a company as something like selecting people for
| Elo above a certain score, but with some type of error
| distribution on top of that, probably Gaussian error. So what
| does a one sided Elo distribution look like with gaussian
| error in picking people above that Elo limit?
| KK7NIL wrote:
| Lichess has public population data (they use a modified
| version of Glicko-2 which is basically an updated version
| of Elo's system):
| https://lichess.org/stat/rating/distribution/blitz
|
| It's basically a Gaussian with a very long right tail.
|
| Big caveat here is that these are the ratings of weekly
| active players. If we instead include casual players, I
| suspect we'd have something resembling a pareto
| distribution.
| JackFr wrote:
| Good question - do the bad players play less because they
| are bad, or are they bad because they play less?
| bhouston wrote:
| > Good question - do the bad players play less because
| they are bad, or are they bad because they play less?
|
| Both for sure. If you don't practice you will never rise
| much about bad. But if you are bad and not progressing
| you won't play much because it isn't rewarding to lose.
|
| One needs to almost figure out those with low ELO
| ratings, what is their history compared to the number of
| games played and see if they were following an expected
| ELO progression.
|
| I wonder if you can estimate with any accuracy where a
| player will eventually plateau given just a small-ish
| sampling of their first games. Basically estimate the
| trajectory based on how they start and progress. This
| would be interesting. Given how studied Chess is, I
| expect this is already done to some extent somewhere.
| jlawson wrote:
| All polygenic traits would be Gaussian by default under the
| simplest assumptions.
|
| E.g. if there are N loci, and each locus has X alleles, and
| some of those alleles increase the trait more than others,
| the trait will ultimately present in a Gaussian distribution.
|
| i.e. if there are lots of genes that affect IQ, IQ will be a
| Gaussian curve across population.
| KK7NIL wrote:
| Very interested point, this is a close corollary to the
| central limit theorem, no?
|
| Doesn't this assume a linear relationship between relevant
| alleles and the given trait though?
| Bootvis wrote:
| It does. A lognormal distribution would model that better
| which gives a nice right tail so maybe it is a useful toy
| model.
| KK7NIL wrote:
| A long right tail Gaussian fits the Elo ratings of active
| chess players very well, as I discussed in adjacent
| comments here.
| boothby wrote:
| The missing assumptions are that the number of genes is
| large, independently distributed (i.e. no correlations
| among different genes), and identically distributed. And
| the whopper: that nurture has no impact.
|
| You can weaken some of those assumptions, but there are
| strong correlations amongst various genes, and between
| genes and nurture. And, one "nurture" variable is
| overwhelmingly correlated to many others: wealth.
|
| Unpacking wealth a little, for the sake of a
| counterexample: one can consider it to be the sum of a
| huge number of random variables. If the central limit
| theorem applied to _any_ sum of random variables, it
| should be Gaussian, right? Nope, it 's much closer to a
| Pareto distribution.
|
| In summary: the conclusion of the central limit theorem
| is very appealing to apply everywhere. But like any
| theorem, you need to pay close attention to the
| preconditions before you make that leap.
| EnergyAmy wrote:
| Do you have a reference for Elo ratings not being Gaussian? A
| casual search shows lots of graphs and discussions saying it
| is.
| KK7NIL wrote:
| Look at my reply to bhouston.
|
| Elo ratings for active players are close to Gaussian, but
| not quite, they show a very clear asymmetry, especially for
| OTB old school Elo (compared to online Glicko-2).
|
| The _active players_ restriction is a big one and one I
| didn 't assume I in my original statement.
| Miraltar wrote:
| To me it says that our system is built on a reasonable but
| untested assumption (performance is a gaussian) and by
| replacing it with an equally reasonable assumption (performance
| is a pareto), suddenly our system looks stupid. It isn't really
| offering a solution but a new perspective
| pama wrote:
| I thought that Bonus Content #1 and the references down the
| article were reasonably convincing. It would be great if large
| companies disclosed such details but it is unlikely.
| wavemode wrote:
| > I would feel better if this was derived from empirical data
| rather than just rhetoric.
|
| This exact statement applies to the practice of Gaussian
| performance ranking. It is pure corporate politics, it isn't
| founded in sound statistics.
|
| The present author at least provides multiple sources of
| statistical evidence for their beliefs, if you read the
| footnotes.
| groby_b wrote:
| > There is probably a ton of data already in different
| industries with regards to productivity.
|
| Uh. Not really. Our industry is notoriously bad at measuring
| productivity.
|
| And the bigger problem is that when we try to measure it -
| "performance review" - we like grading on a gaussian curve.
| We'll never know if that's correct because we put our thumb on
| the scale.
|
| An even bigger problem is that productivity is strongly
| influenced by completely non-technical factors. How
| enthusiastic are folks about what they are doing[1], how much
| variety do their tasks have [2], what are their peers like,
| etc. (Of course, that whole field of study has issues rooted in
| the inability to measure precisely as well)
|
| Ultimately, it's a squishy judgment applied by humans.
|
| [1] https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/What-Predicts-
| Software...
|
| [2] https://research.google/pubs/what-predicts-software-
| develope...
| hinkley wrote:
| > I think that any of these simplified distributions are likely
| not generalizable across companies and industries
|
| It's going to be multivariate statistics with dependent
| variables. The quality of non developers at company affects the
| quality of developers they can retain, and the quality of the
| developers you have affects the quality of developers you can
| recruit and improve. Almost all the people I'd want to work
| with again left my last employer before I did.
|
| You can take on more and more work yourself but it causes
| everyone around you to disengage. At some point you have to
| realize it's more fruitful, emotionally and mathematically, to
| make coworkers produce one more unit of forward progress a
| month than to do it to yourself. Because it's 2% for the team
| one way and 5-10% the other.
| doctorpangloss wrote:
| This article: "Wouldn't it be cool if when you measure employee
| performance, it turned out to fit a Pareto distribution better
| than a Gaussian?"
|
| Would that be cool? We could posit the implications of all sorts
| of improbabilities. But I feel more strongly about how cool it
| would be that P = NP.
|
| All this aside, being laid off sucks - being pushed out, even
| when you're a high performer, sucks even more. The truth is that
| "data science" does not help you process grief the way reading
| Dostoevsky does, so maybe getting an A in your liberal arts
| education is valuable even when you are working as a software
| developer.
| morkalork wrote:
| If you ever look at tranditional human-driven sales data, you'll
| often see a small percentage of top performers absolutely
| dominating the total sales volume. So yes, employee performance
| is not Gaussian at all.
| Joel_Mckay wrote:
| "Hey wait - is [arbitrary metrics] Gaussian distributed?"
|
| =3
| riazrizvi wrote:
| This whole thread smh. It feels like a military power convinced
| it can win a war by flying around in airplanes at 30,000' and
| they are here vigorously discussing their insane tactics. It's
| time for me to leave Silicon Valley.
| wing-_-nuts wrote:
| One reason I'd never work for a company with a 'bottom 10% gets
| PIP'd' mentality is that it directly conflicts with my goal of
| self development. Of _course_ I want to be on a great team where
| everyone performs better than I do. That 's how I hone my craft!
| It just seems really wasteful to have to cull the bottom 10% of
| every team, even if that team is performing well. I wish there
| was a list of companies that subscribed to that mentality, so I
| could avoid them.
| dmurray wrote:
| > For what it's worth, human height is also Gaussian, and that's
| correlated with workplace success.
|
| Height is generally not considered to be Gaussian and this is
| exactly the kind of statistics mistake the author seems to be
| accusing employers of. Adult height is somewhere between Gaussian
| and bimodal.
| timdellinger wrote:
| Fair enough.
|
| Perhaps better stated as "adult human height is approximately
| Gaussian for a given biological sex", with an asterisk that
| environmental factors stretch the distribution.
|
| I love the anecdote that people born in the American colonies
| came back to England to visit family, and were remarkably
| taller compared to their cousins due to environmental factors.
| warrentr wrote:
| In the work rules book about google, Bock claims (apparently
| using a lot of real data from google) that employee performance
| follows a power law distribution.
| seiferteric wrote:
| A lot of focus on employee performance, but relatively little on
| management performance. I always wonder how a once great company
| can slowly decline into irrelevance. Take yahoo for example, it
| could only be due to management failure over several decades
| right? How can companies optimize for management performance?
| bornfreddy wrote:
| Firing 10% each year would be a great start in many companies.
| ;)
| AtlasBarfed wrote:
| 1) performance reviews are never aligned with employee value,
| because companies are strongly invested to take excess production
| from employees and transfer it to management, secondarily
| shareholders
|
| 2) the are also not aligned with the replacement cost of
| employees because the religion of management is that labor is
| effortlessly replaceable and low value
|
| 3) employee retention is not aligned with corporate performance
| in Machiavellian middle management, it is aligned with manager
| promotion for things like loyalty and maintaining fiefdom power,
| budgetary size, headcount, etc
|
| 4) there are no absolute or ever directly derived metrics in
| software development that have ever worked, to say nothing of
| other positions
|
| Those are off the top of my head.
| xmly wrote:
| Well, managers are trying to make it Gaussian, but underlying is
| actually power law.
| crazygringo wrote:
| This is very unconvincing. The author already admits one reason
| why:
|
| > _But there are low-performing employees at large corporations;
| we've all seen them. My perspective is that they're hiring
| errors. Yes, hiring errors should be addressed, but it's not
| clear that there's an obvious specific percentage of the
| workforce that is the result of hiring errors._
|
| I think it _is_ clear that we expect a certain percentage of
| hiring "errors". And that they are not binary but rather a
| continuum. And that there are lots of other factors like
| employees who were great when they were hired but stopped caring
| and are "coasting" or just burnt out, who got promoted or
| transferred when they shouldn't have been and are bad at their
| new level/role, and so forth.
|
| The Pareto distribution isn't particularly relevant here, because
| a hiring process isn't trying to get a whole slice of the overall
| labor market with clear cutoffs. For any position, _it 's trying
| to maximize the performance it can get at a given salary_, and we
| have no reason to expect the errors it makes in under- and over-
| estimating performance to be anything but relatively symmetric.
|
| So a Gaussian distribution is a _far_ more reasonable assumption
| than a slice of the Pareto distribution, when you look at the
| multiplicity of factors involved.
| wavemode wrote:
| > So a Gaussian distribution is a far more reasonable
| assumption than a slice of the Pareto distribution
|
| It's not an assumption. See the evidence referenced in the
| footnotes.
| crazygringo wrote:
| Incorrect.
|
| It is absolutely an assumption. The "evidence" in the
| footnotes is about _national_ salary data. _Not_ the
| distribution for any individual position at a company.
|
| And it is entirely possible (and probable) that performance
| at each position is distributed as a Gaussian, and all those
| Gaussians add up to a Pareto at a population level.
|
| But you simply _cannot_ take national-level data and assume
| it applies at the micro level. That 's not how statistics
| works.
| dheera wrote:
| Personally I think manager/report mismatches are far greater
| than hiring errors.
|
| When A doesn't like B it doesn't mean A or B are necessarily
| unfit to work at the company, but it generally results in the
| subordinate being framed as underperforming or not being given
| the resources to perform.
| jedberg wrote:
| One of the things I loved about working at Netflix was that the
| base assumption was that everyone was a top performer. If you
| weren't a top performer, you were given a severance check.
|
| The analogy we used was a sports team. Pro sports teams have
| really good players and great players. Some people are
| superstars, but unless you're at least really really good you're
| not on the team.
|
| Performance and compensation were completely separate, which was
| also nice. Performance evals were 360 peer reviews, and
| compensation was determined mostly by HR based on what it was
| costing to bring in new hires, and then bumping everyone up to
| that level.
|
| So at least at Netflix 10 years ago, performance wasn't really
| distributed at all. Everyone was top 10% industrywide.
| brabel wrote:
| It's really difficult for me to believe that they really got
| 10% top performers. For one, knowing the cut-throat nature of
| employment there, I would expect only a minority of developers
| would be willing to try working there, despite the awesome
| rewards.
|
| Another reason I really don't trust that to be true is that
| I've never seen a good way to measure who is a top performer
| and who is not. I don't think there's one, people are good in
| different things, even within the same job... for one
| assignment, Joe may be the best, but for another, Mary is the
| winner (but again, to measure this reliably and objectively is
| nearly impossible IMHO for anything related to knowledge work -
| and I've read lots of research in this area!).
|
| Finally, just as a cheap shot at Netflix, sorry I can't resist
| as a customer: they absolutely suck at the most basic stuff in
| their business, which is to produce good content in the first
| place, and very importantly, NOT FREAKING CANCEL the best
| content! I won't even mention how horrible their latest big
| live stream was... oh well, I just did :D.
| kube-system wrote:
| > the most basic stuff in their business, which is to produce
| good content in the first place, and very importantly, NOT
| FREAKING CANCEL the best content!
|
| It isn't that simple. Making money from content is not 1-to-1
| related with the quality of the content. There are many
| examples of great content that doesn't make money, and many
| examples of content that makes a lot of money that isn't
| great. Also there are many differing opinions on what 'great
| content' even is.
| echelon wrote:
| It's an increasingly bad business to be in.
|
| Netflix burns customers when they cancel beloved shows, and
| they constantly have to experiment.
|
| They now have a bazillion competitors who are ramping up
| comparable businesses. There's no moat or secret sauce
| competitive advantage. Customers are free to switch at no
| cost.
|
| Bigger tech companies are using media content as simply a
| fringe benefit or commodity to enhance their platform
| offerings.
|
| YouTube, on the other hand, is already starting to eclipse
| the entire Netflix business model. YouTube is a monster
| with a huge and enviable moat, and it's only going to
| continue growing. It's a much stronger business model and
| they have a sticky and growing user base.
| exe34 wrote:
| I think it's safe to assume gp has drunk the koolaid. I spoke
| to somebody from the army once, and they too had the top 10%
| and it's difficult to imagine that every employer employs the
| top 10%. it's a cultural meme really, like everybody tells
| themselves they are good people really.
| jajko wrote:
| At some point, people invest into their work/employment so
| heavily and tie it to their identity tad too much, they
| internally need to feel this is the right and best choice,
| which for many top talents may mean working with "top 10%",
| whatever that means. So otherwise smart folks will start
| parroting official company policies and become a 'good
| boy'. Suffice to say I don't look kindly on this, but it
| highly depends on the business.
|
| I've heard similar claims many times before, albeit mostly
| not from places paying so much. Ie at university, there was
| promotion seminar from Accenture branch in our country, the
| guy was some higher manager and stated the same, how they
| want only the best of the best and work hard getting and
| maintaining this. Then maybe 10 years later I had 20 of
| them as contractors and reality was not that rosy, huge
| variation from good to terrible.
| exe34 wrote:
| I love my job, but I'm careful not to give the impression
| at work. Best to keep them on their toes. I'm also good
| at weaving the corpospeak into conversations, but very
| few can hear the sarcasm.
| relaxing wrote:
| At least good behavior isn't a zero-sum game.
| exe34 wrote:
| not everybody can be in the top 10% best behaved.
| lbrito wrote:
| Like the Leadership Principles, or expecting everyone in
| your company to be a "leader". If everyone is a leader, the
| word is meaningless.
| creer wrote:
| > difficult for me to believe that they really got 10% top
| performers
|
| It's difficult to achieve, but it's not an unreasonable
| objective to have. After that there is a question of
| measurement. How do you measure that? Did they? What was
| their score? - and yes, until the evidence is released, they
| probably didn't. (But I would also cut slack on the
| measurement - it IS difficult to measure so a decent attempt
| - a top 10% attempt? - will do.)
|
| Where the "top performers" meme obviously fails is when every
| new business and their sister claims the same thing. We are
| all winners here and all that.
| FuriouslyAdrift wrote:
| Netflix has a reputation for the highest salaries in tech.
| That tends to attract top talent.
|
| https://medium.com/dice-insights/netflix-ceo-explains-why-
| he...
| crystal_revenge wrote:
| My career experience has been that there's low correlation
| between TC and talent, especially at the high end of the
| talent spectrum.
|
| While I know some really smart people working at various
| FAANGS making great TC, nearly all of the people that are
| truly something special are grinding away on hard problems,
| relatively unknown, getting paid "fine" because they'd
| rather work on truly hard problems than make optimal
| amounts of money.
|
| My experience has been that the high TC crowd is above
| average skillwise, but attracts far more people whose
| number one concern career-wise is maximizing TC. These are
| often people that chose technical work because they did the
| math and felt it was the highest paying per effort required
| but aren't really _passionate_ about the areas they get
| paid in.
|
| Truly brilliant people, especially ones from less
| traditional backgrounds, tend to have a hard time surviving
| in high TC orgs because they aren't aligned with the
| culture. Likewise whenever I interact with someone in a
| high TC role, I'm undoubtedly disappointed by how little
| they care about their area of work. For them the point of
| the job is to make money, and they make a lot of money, so
| there's nothing to talk about.
| ip26 wrote:
| You can apply a filter to top 10% talent and get a
| perfectly well supplied collection of driven, high output
| people who are motivated by high TC. It's a subset, of
| course. And while visionary genius may not be motivated
| by TC, nobody said Netflix was looking to crack string
| theory. People don't _have_ to be passionate about their
| job to do really good work.
| lolinder wrote:
| > I would expect only a minority of developers would be
| willing to try working there, despite the awesome rewards.
|
| So much this. OP's description of the work environment is
| stressing me out and I don't even work there.
|
| At best a strategy like the one described above will get you
| the top 10% of people who are willing to put up with that
| kind of work environment, which means you _might_ get the top
| 10% of single, childless 20-35-year-olds--people who are
| motivated first and foremost by ego and pay and don 't value
| stability and work-life balance. But in the process you're
| more or less explicitly saying that you're not interested in
| people who are further along in their lives and value
| stability and reliability more than ego and raw paycheck
| size.
|
| This means that you're missing out on the top 10% of
| 35-65-year-old engineers who are now parents with
| responsibilities outside of their career, even though the top
| 10% of that bracket would typically be "better" by most
| metrics than the top 10% of the younger bracket you're pre-
| filtering down to.
|
| In a startup environment this might be a perfectly rational
| tradeoff--you _want_ to filter for people who don 't have
| much else to do and can give you a huge amount of unpaid
| overtime in exchange for you stroking their ego--but past a
| certain size and market share you need the stability offered
| by mature, experienced professionals.
|
| If Netflix failed to get over that hump, it's not so
| surprising after all that they fell so hard in the last 10
| years.
| jedberg wrote:
| Most of the people I worked with were 30-50 years old with
| families and kids. The work life balance was great. I was
| the rare outlier who was married without kids.
|
| We had senior engineers who would work hard and get things
| done and then go and be parents and partners.
| relaxing wrote:
| We're going to need a rigorous, data-driven assessment of
| their effectiveness in parenting and partnering to back
| up this claim.
| jedberg wrote:
| > It's really difficult for me to believe that they really
| got 10% top performers.
|
| Of course there is no hard data on it, but I can say
| anecdotally the people I know who went on elsewhere were
| consistently rated at the top of whatever organization they
| landed at. And also, there wasn't a single person there that
| I would not want to work with again and would jump at that
| chance.
|
| > For one, knowing the cut-throat nature of employment there,
| I would expect only a minority of developers would be willing
| to try working there, despite the awesome rewards.
|
| On the flip side, a lot of people wanted to work there
| _because_ of that culture. But you 're right, some really
| great people wouldn't even apply, won't deny that.
|
| > Finally, just as a cheap shot at Netflix, sorry I can't
| resist as a customer: they absolutely suck at the most basic
| stuff in their business, which is to produce good content in
| the first place, and very importantly, NOT FREAKING CANCEL
| the best content!
|
| Actually, objectively, it's not the best content, which is
| why it gets cut. The way that decision is made is every piece
| of content is charted on a cost vs minutes watched. Then that
| chart is looked at by actual humans.
|
| Some content, like reruns from the 1950s, is super efficient.
| It's not watched a lot but it also costs very little, so it
| stays. Some content, like the latest Marvel movie (before
| Disney had their own streaming service) was very inefficient,
| but it was kept because it was a big marketing draw. But some
| content didn't quite make it over the line because it was
| expensive but niche. It was popular amongst a small set of
| die hard fans.
|
| I think your complaint it more about the industry in general
| though -- it's not just Netflix that doesn't give a show room
| to grow. Even the old school TV networks cut shows much
| quicker now than they did before.
|
| > I won't even mention how horrible their latest big live
| stream was... oh well, I just did :D.
|
| Netflix knows it didn't go well. Streaming in general used to
| break just as much. But the nice thing was that they gave us
| the resources to hire the right people and the autonomy to
| fix it. And so we did things like create Chaos Engineering
| and OpenConnect. I suspect the same will happen with live
| streaming.
| suzzer99 wrote:
| > Another reason I really don't trust that to be true is that
| I've never seen a good way to measure who is a top performer
| and who is not.
|
| I can work at a new place for a week and know who the top
| performers are. Their names are all over the commits, and
| whenever you ask someone a question, you get funneled to the
| top performers.
|
| Then you talk to them. If they're open and engaging, and
| don't seem like they got their status just by being around
| forever, they're almost certainly a top performer.
| Eikon wrote:
| How are 'top performers' and 'low performers' being defined in
| this context?
|
| In my experience, these labels in corporate environments often
| correlate more with social dynamics and political acumen than
| actual work output. People who are less socially connected or
| don't engage in office politics may find themselves labeled as
| 'low performers' regardless of their actual contributions,
| while those who excel at workplace networking might be deemed
| 'top performers'.
|
| The interview process of these kind of companies also often
| falls into a problematic pattern where interviewers pose
| esoteric questions they've recently researched or that happen
| to align with their narrow specialization from years in the
| same role. This turns technical interviews into more of a game
| of matching specific knowledge rather than evaluating problem-
| solving abilities, broader engineering competence or any notion
| of 'performance'.
|
| Let's be honest: how many people can truly separate personal
| feelings from performance evaluation? Even with structured
| review processes in place, would most evaluators give high
| marks to someone they personally dislike, even if that person
| consistently delivers excellent work?
| efitz wrote:
| > problematic pattern where interviewers pose esoteric
| questions they've recently researched
|
| The days of the "brain teaser" interview question are gone,
| at least from the "magnificent 7" and similar big tech
| companies. Nowadays it's coding, behavioral, and design, at
| least for engineers.
|
| I concur with the sentiment that performance ranking has a
| very significant social component. If you have a bad
| relationship with your manager, watch out. But also, if your
| manager has a bad relationship with THEIR manager, or are not
| adept at representing their employees, you can get screwed
| too.
| thifhi wrote:
| > Performance and compensation were completely separate, which
| was also nice.
|
| Huh? How is that nice? Does performance and compensation not
| correlate in your ideal world, or am I misunderstanding it?
| jedberg wrote:
| In my ideal world, no they do not. Pay equals what it would
| cost to rehire me today. Performance should always be great
| for what you are expected to do.
|
| Where the two correlate is that if you're hiring a mid-level
| person they get mid-level pay, and if they are top performing
| mid-level, they get promoted to senior and get commensurate
| pay.
|
| So performance leads to promotions which leads to better pay.
| But pay is not directly correlated with performance. I expect
| everyone in the same level to have equal performance (over
| the long term, of course there will be short term
| variations).
| HWR_14 wrote:
| I read that as compensation wasn't correlated to your
| performance _relative to peers_. Which is I think what most
| people would appreciate in an ideal world. I don 't think
| they meant absolute performance and compensation weren't
| linked.
| haolez wrote:
| How can 360 peer performance reviews ever work? The incentives
| are against a fair evaluation: the reviewers have the incentive
| to overly criticize others so that they can stand out more.
|
| I'm not saying that everyone on a 360 review process does that.
| But the incentive is there and it's working against fair
| reviews.
| stonemetal12 wrote:
| >The incentives are against a fair evaluation: the reviewers
| have the incentive to overly criticize others so that they
| can stand out more.
|
| Wouldn't that(how you view and fit in with your team) be part
| of your review? If I was Bob's manager and all reviews he
| gave of his teammates were "Teammate M is a dumbass and the
| only reason they are productive is because I do 80% of their
| job for them", wouldn't leave me thinking Bob is great. It
| would leave me thinking Bob is a jerk who doesn't work well
| with others.
| jedberg wrote:
| If performance is not tied to pay, why would you have an
| incentive to do that?
|
| If anything the incentive is problematic in the other
| direction. People tend to be nice because they don't want to
| say mean things that they know the manager will see.
| yreg wrote:
| A bit offtopic, but I've been curious about this.
|
| Could you please describe how the unlimited vacation policy
| worked? How did people feel about it and whether they were
| anxious regarding using it (afraid that it will reflect on them
| badly when they take "too much" time off)?
| jedberg wrote:
| I loved the unlimited vacation policy. I took more vacation
| at Netflix than anywhere else. No one was anxious about using
| it.
|
| It helped that senior leadership set a good example. The CEO
| took a few weeks off every year and made sure everyone knew
| that it was ok to do that. He also made sure all his directs
| took a few weeks every year at a minimum.
|
| There was a culture of management encouraging you to take
| advantage of the program.
| ksdnjweusdnkl21 wrote:
| Ok, but how about few months? Did anyone do that?
| relaxing wrote:
| Not even workers in France get a few months vacation.
| What are you after here?
| fnfjfk wrote:
| "Unlimited" means there is no limit, so logically it
| means a few months should be fine. If a few months not
| fine, I think a reasonable request would be to define the
| limit and claim _that_ instead of "unlimited".
|
| I work at place with about 5 work weeks off, which is a
| lot for the US, and there's never any question about
| whether you can use your time or not because the number
| of days is exactly specified. I like that better than a
| vague "unlimited" (but not actually) policy.
| yreg wrote:
| We have an actual unlimited _unpaid_ time off policy. I
| have several colleagues who have taken 6+ months off
| (even repeatedly). Obviously I suspect that wouldn 't be
| well-received within the "unlimited" paid leave at
| Netflix (but perhaps I'm wrong, I just can't imagine it).
| jedberg wrote:
| New parents did sometimes take a couple of months, but
| typically no. Some people would do 4-5 weeks in the
| summer. If could get your work done and set things up to
| run without you, it wasn't a problem.
|
| You had unlimited vacation, but you still had to get your
| job done.
| dangus wrote:
| In summary, Netflix told all their employees that they are so
| amazing at their job, they are the top 10% of the whole world,
| they are like NFL athletes. If they don't perform to top tier
| levels, they'll be shown the door.
|
| Here's a thought experiment: pretend that Netflix is lying and
| that their employees are not actually made up of the top 10% of
| talent industrywide. Let's for this thought experiment assume
| the realit is that they have slightly above average talent
| because Netflix pays slightly above industry average.
|
| But now they've convinced those employees that they're not just
| slightly above average, they are like elite NFL players. And
| that means they have to work like elite NFL players. Netflix
| convinces their employees to work XX% harder with longer hours
| than the rest of the industry because they _think_ they are
| elite.
|
| "Only amazing pro athlete geniuses can work here" is way more
| motivating than "You have to work yourself to death with extra
| hours to make quota or you're fired!" because it's a
| manipulation of the ego.
|
| I think this thought experiment is closer to reality than
| Netflix or their kool-aid-drunk employees will admit, and that
| Netflix's "pro athlete" culture is worker-harming psychological
| manipulation.
| jonas21 wrote:
| Most Netflix employees have worked at other places and can
| make the comparison for themselves. They don't have to take
| Netflix' word for it.
|
| Also, since when is telling people they're good at what they
| do "worker-harming psychological manipulation?"
| MilanTodorovic wrote:
| My guess would be that it nurtures the imposter sydrome
| once the "top performer" starts struggeling with something
| they shouldn't if they truely were a top performer.
| dangus wrote:
| The employees are making that judgment in an environment
| that has been tainted by the psychological manipulation
| itself.
|
| How many people have brains that are going to seriously put
| up a fight for objective truth when other people talk them
| up like that? If you tell me my team is full of excellent
| talent I'm not going to self-sabotage my ego and question
| it.
|
| It's negative psychological manipulation when it's being
| used as an excuse to fire and replace reasonably productive
| people.
|
| The employment contract is highly lopsided. An employee is
| harmed far more when they are fired than a business, and
| Netflix exploits that advantage with this organizational
| culture.
| vineyardlabs wrote:
| The interesting thing about this thought experiment is that
| you assume Netflix would have slightly above average
| employees if they have slightly above average compensation.
| Now what happens to the experiment if Netflix has
| ridiculously above average, end of the bell curve
| compensation (as they do)? Serious question, I do not and
| have not worked for Netflix.
| dangus wrote:
| I was really giving them the benefit of the doubt. I don't
| think Netflix had anything special above and beyond any
| other Silicon Valley software company. They just pushed
| this narrative and nobody questioned them.
|
| Netflix as a business isn't even way ahead of competition
| anymore. It's not better than Hulu or Max or anything else.
|
| Netflix's platform crumbled handling live streaming a
| boxing match, while Amazon and the rest of the legacy media
| companies have no issues streaming NFL games every weekend,
| and I'm supposed to believe that Netflix engineers are
| better than the ones at Paramount+ who never made me wait
| for a buffer to watch Premier League or NFL on CBS.
| vineyardlabs wrote:
| Yeah perhaps times have changed. When I was an intern at
| JPL 10 years ago they brought some senior Netflix folks
| in to talk about their CDN reliability efforts and it was
| really impressive. I believe it was called Chaos Monkey
| and it effectively would take down data centers in
| production at random, forcing their network to be
| extremely reliable. Pretty wild idea.
| lifeisstillgood wrote:
| Logically no-one else will try this - because if every company
| competed for the top talent, wages would rise to consume all
| profit.
|
| I think this is probably how labour and capital should compete
| - I expect we need to equalise tax treatment so that becomes
| more possible
| ianbicking wrote:
| "IQ is Gaussian" - it was pointed out somewhere, and only then
| became obvious to me, that IQ is not Gaussian. The distribution
| is manufactured.
|
| If you have 1000 possible IQ questions, you can ask a bunch of
| people those questions, and then pick out 100 questions that form
| a Gaussian distribution. This is how IQ tests are created.
|
| This is not unreasonable... if you picked out 100 super easy
| questions you wouldn't get much information, everyone would be in
| the "knows quite a lot" category. But you could try to create a
| uniform distribution, for instance, and still have a test that is
| usefully sensitive. But if you worry about the accuracy of the
| test then a Gaussian distribution is kind of convenient...
| there's this expectation that 50th percentile is not that
| different than 55th percentile, and people mostly care about that
| 5% difference only with 90th vs 95th. (But I don't think people
| care much about the difference between 10th percentile and 5th...
| which might imply an actual Pareto distribution, though I think
| it probably reflects more on societal attention)
|
| Anyway, kind of an aside, but also similar to what the article
| itself is talking about
| FredPret wrote:
| This is a subtle aspect of intelligence measurement that not
| many people think about.
|
| To go from an IQ of 100 to 130 might require an increase in
| brainpower of x, and from 130 to 170 might require 3x for
| example, and from 170-171 might be 9x compared to 100.
|
| We have to have a relative scale and contrive a Gaussian from
| the scores because we don't have an absolute measure of
| intelligence.
|
| It would be a monumental achievement if computer science ever
| advances to the point where we have a mathematical way of
| determining the minimum absolute intelligence required to solve
| a given problem.
| logicchains wrote:
| >It would be a monumental achievement if computer science
| ever advances to the point where we have a mathematical way
| of determining the minimum absolute intelligence required to
| solve a given problem
|
| For a huge number of problems (including many on IQ tests)
| computer science does in fact have a mathematical way of
| determining the minimum absolute amount of compute necessary
| to solve the problem. That's what complexity theory is. Then
| it's just a matter of estimating someone's "compute" from how
| fast they solve a given class of problems relative to some
| reference computer.
| shkkmo wrote:
| > Then it's just a matter of estimating someone's "compute"
| from how fast they solve a given class of problems relative
| to some reference computer.
|
| Heh... "just"...
|
| Good luck with that.
| FredPret wrote:
| You're right - we can get closer and closer to an absolute
| measure by looking at many brains and AI's solving a
| problem, and converging to maximum performance given a
| certain amount of hardware by tweaking the algorithm or
| approach used.
|
| But I think proving that maximum performance is really the
| ultimate level, from first principles, is a much harder
| task than looking at a performance graph and guesstimating
| the asymptote.
| silvestrov wrote:
| I wonder how a graph looks for "how many seconds does it take
| people to run 100 meters".
|
| Might be a mix because quite a number of older or overweight
| people runs very slowly and some can't at all.
| hammock wrote:
| Poisson distribution
| groby_b wrote:
| > It would be a monumental achievement if computer science
| ever advances to the point where we have a mathematical way
| of determining the minimum absolute intelligence required to
| solve a given problem.
|
| While that would be nice, it's likely a pipe dream :( There's
| a good chance "intelligence" is really a multi-dimensional
| thing influenced by a lot of different factors. We like
| pretending it's one-dimensional so we can sort folks (and
| money reinforces that one-dimensional thinking), but that
| means setting ourselves up for failure.
|
| It doesn't help that the tests we currently have (e.g. IQ)
| are deeply flawed and taint any thinking about the space.
| (Not least because folks who took a test and scored well are
| deeply invested in that test being right ;)
| FredPret wrote:
| It might be the hardest problem of them all, because you'd
| have to understand how all problems work.
|
| But on the other hand, maybe it all comes down to a Turing
| machine requiring a particular length of tape and runtime.
| nextn wrote:
| What is a flaw of the IQ test?
| fnordlord wrote:
| I didn't know that about how IQ tests are formed. Would that
| mean that there could be some sliver of the population that
| could score in the top %'s on the 1000 question test but due to
| the selection of questions, scored average on the final IQ
| exam? If so, that'll be my excuse next time I have to take an
| IQ exam. I just got the wrong distribution.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| It's worse, because every test is obviously bounded, and it's
| absurd to not expect some noise to be there.
|
| Join those two, and the test only becomes reasonable near the
| middle. But the middle is exactly where the pick of questions
| makes the most difference.
|
| All said, this means that IQ is kinda useful for sociological
| studies with large samples. But if you use it you are adding
| error, it's not reasonable to expect that error not to
| correlate with whatever you are looking at (since nobody
| understands it well), and it's not reasonable to expect the
| results to be stable. And it's really useless to make decisions
| based on small sample sizes.
| jppope wrote:
| Correct. IQ isn't an effective measurement of intelligence as
| is typically stated. It is (at best) a measurement of learning
| disabilities.
| liontwist wrote:
| It's a pretty good measurement of your ability to play logic
| games and fast pattern match.
|
| I'm sure we agree that doesn't constitute "intelligence", but
| it's more than disability.
| mjburgess wrote:
| Individual test-retest variability is high. It's only a
| valid measure of anything much below 100.
|
| Consider a test of walking speed which each time you take
| it gives results of (2, 3, 6, 2, 3, 5, 7, 3) etc. -- does
| this measure some innate property of walking speed? No.
|
| Yet, if it were < 1, it would measure having a broken foot.
| liontwist wrote:
| Lots of research disagrees with you indicating it's
| measurable and rigid throughout most of your life.
| mjburgess wrote:
| The entire field of psychometrics is pseudoscience, as is
| >>90% of research with the word "heritability" in it.
|
| The levels of pseudoscience in these areas, statistical
| malpractice, and the like is fairly obscene. Nothing is
| reproducible, and it survives only because academia is
| now a closed-system paper mill where peer citation is the
| standard of publication and tenure.
|
| A discussion of statistical malpractice is difficult on
| HN, consider how easily fooled these idiots are by
| statistics. Researchers motivated to get into psychology
| are not rigorous empirical statisticians, instead they
| are given stats GUIs into which they put data and press
| play. These are the most gullible lot you'll ever find in
| anything called science.
|
| The world would be better off if a delete button could be
| pressed on the whole activity. It's a great tragedy that
| it continues.
| liontwist wrote:
| If it was really "pseudoscience" you would present the
| experiment that demonstrates it's obviously false rather
| than name calling (asserting a label with a negative
| connotation).
|
| The reality is not so clear and you have to contest with
| decade long studies in support. Maybe those studies have
| flaws, but it's not a vacuum.
|
| I have already stated I don't believe IQ is intelligence.
| mjburgess wrote:
| There is no experiment which proves its false. This is
| the problem with pseudoscience, it's "not even wrong".
|
| Psychometrics presents summaries of data as if they are
| properties of reality. As-if taking a mean of survey data
| _meant_ that this this mean was a property of the survey
| givers.
|
| This applies only in extremely controlled experiments in
| physics, and even then, somewhat rarely.
|
| All one has to do to show the entire field is
| pseudoscience is present a single more plausible theory
| than "mean of data distribution = innate property", and
| this is trivially done (eg., cf. mutualism about
| intelligence).
| liontwist wrote:
| You're softening your position, you agree it exists and
| is testable, you just disagree with the interpretation of
| those results.
|
| > is present a single more plausible theory
|
| A minority support for a workable theory is quite a bit
| different state of affairs than "false science" which the
| word implies.
|
| It's a form of name calling.
|
| > There is no experiment which proves it's false. This is
| the problem with pseudoscience, it's "not even wrong".
|
| In other words it's lost popularity in certain academic
| circles, but not because of overwhelming new evidence.
|
| > This applies only in extremely controlled experiments
| in physics,
|
| I agree, which is why you can't casually dismiss
| developed psychological theories as if they are from a
| crank, and you are enlightened.
| tptacek wrote:
| I think this would be more accurate without the "at best"; I
| think IQ is widely considered to be a useful diagnostic
| measure, misapplied to prediction in generalized populations.
| smj-edison wrote:
| I think IQ is useful in aggregate (for example, a finding
| that exposure to local toxins reduces a cities' performance
| on IQ by 10 points), but not useful an an individual level
| (e.g. you have an IQ of 130, so we can say with certainty you
| will earn $30,000 more per year). It's similar with MRI scans
| of ADHD: they find brain differences at a large scale, but
| you can't use a MRI to diagnose ADHD.
| sapiogram wrote:
| > and then pick out 100 questions that form a Gaussian
| distribution. This is how IQ tests are created.
|
| You missed an extremely important final step. People's scores
| on those 100 questions still aren't going to form a Gaussion
| distribution. You have to rank-order everyone's scores, then
| you assign the final IQ scores based on each person's ranking,
| _not_ their raw score.
| fwip wrote:
| It would form a gaussian distribution if you pick the
| questions carefully enough.
|
| If you rank-order scores and fit to the distribution after
| the fact, the questions are nearly irrelevant, as long as you
| have a mix of easy, medium and hard questions.
| sapiogram wrote:
| > It would form a gaussian distribution if you pick the
| questions carefully enough.
|
| Why would that be the case? The Central Limit Theorem does
| not apply here, because the observations (questions) are
| correlated with each other.
| EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK wrote:
| Sum of N independent similarly distributed variables
| (questions), will tend to be normally distributed, that the
| central limit theorem, no need to manufacture anything.
| mjburgess wrote:
| They're not independent.
| EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK wrote:
| Yeah, if one answers question A correctly, they is more
| likely to answer question B correctly, right?
| mjburgess wrote:
| Indeed. The whole premise of the activity is that they
| are highly correlated.
|
| The imposition of a normal distribution is done ad-hoc at
| the _population_ level. All it says is that _if_ scores
| were normally distributed, then "people would be so-and-
| so comparable".
|
| Almost all assumptions of this method are false.
|
| Any time anyone mentions the central limit theorem in
| applied stats is a warning sign for pseudoscience. If
| reality existed at the end of the CLT, it would be in
| heat death.
| CSMastermind wrote:
| IQ scores have proven highly correlated to educational
| achievement, occupational attainment, career advancement,
| lifetime earnings, brain volume, cortical thickness, health,
| longevity, and more.
|
| To the point of being accurate predictors of these things even
| when controlling for things like socioeconomic background.
|
| It's used because it works as a measuring tool, how the tests
| are constructed is largely irrelevant to the question of if the
| outcome of the test is an accurate predictor of things we care
| about.
|
| If you think you have a better measuring tool you should
| propose it and win several awards and accolades. No one has
| found one yet in spite of many smart people trying for decades.
| jprete wrote:
| The GP is saying that IQ tests are deliberately calibrated
| and normalized to produce a Gaussian output, and that the
| input is not necessarily a Gaussian distribution of any
| particular quantity.
|
| This doesn't say anything in particular about whether it's
| useful, just that people should be careful interpreting the
| values directly.
| lokar wrote:
| Exactly. This is a criticism of the article where it says
| that HR has a good reason for assuming employee performance
| would be Gaussian, since IQ is Gaussian.
|
| IQ is defined a being Gaussian
| ip26 wrote:
| _If_ IQ is a good predictor of employee performance, then
| it does follow that employee performance would be
| Gaussian. It doesn't matter that IQ was "made" to be
| Gaussian.
| lokar wrote:
| Are you assuming that employee performance is Gaussian?
| ianbicking wrote:
| I'm not saying the ranking is necessarily wrong, but that
| turning the ranking into a distribution is constructed. And
| it MIGHT be a correct construction, but I am less confident
| that is true.
|
| The distribution implies something like "someone at 50% is
| not that different than someone at 55%" but "someone at 90%
| is very different from 95%". That is: the x axis implies
| there's some unit of intelligence, and the actual
| intelligence of people in the middle is roughly similar
| despite ranking differences. That distribution also implies
| that when you get to the extremities the ranking reflects
| greater differences in intelligence.
| HDThoreaun wrote:
| The distribution implies that a score of 100 means you did
| better than half the population, and that a score of 130
| means you did 2 standard deviations better than the
| population ie. better than 95% of other people. We have no
| objective measure of IQ so we use relative rankings. If you
| used a uniform distribution for iq everyone currently above
| 145 would have 99 out of 100 IQ. Normal distribution is
| useful when you want to differentiate points in the tails
| Glyptodon wrote:
| It does seem like you should assume the accuracy of the
| result decreases as you get away from the norm of an IQ
| test, though I have no idea if it's been validated. But
| particularly if there are mistakes on the test questions or
| any kinds of ambiguity in any of the questions, it seems
| like you'd expect that.
|
| Like if you have two different IQ tests and someone takes
| one, and gets 100, if 100 is normed to the 50th percentile,
| maybe you have 95% confidence that on the next test they're
| also getting 100 +/- 2.5. But if they get 140, that's
| normed to like 99th percentile, maybe your 95% confidence
| interval for the next test is 140 +/- 12.5. (I really don't
| know, I just suspect that the higher the percentile someone
| gets, the less confidence you'd have and mostly know stats
| from physical and bio science labs, not from IQ or human
| evaluation contexts.)
| torginus wrote:
| Yes, this has always bothered me. IQ doesn't easily correspond
| to any measurable real-world quality.
|
| For example, if we would postulate that height is gaussian, we
| could measure people's heights and just ordering them we could
| create a gaussian distribution. Then we could verify the
| hypothesis of height being gaussian by mapping the probability
| distribution function's parameter to a linear value (cm) and
| find that these approaches line up experimentally.
|
| We could do the same thing with any comparable quantity and
| make an order of them and try to map them to a gaussian
| distribution, but we would have no knowledge if what we were
| making actually corresponded to a linear quantity.
|
| This is a serious issue, as basically making any claim like
| 'group A scores 5 points higher than group B' is automatically,
| mathematically invalid.
| zo1 wrote:
| People may find that manufactured or "oh IQ is just made up and
| there is no measure of intelligence". But I find beauty in the
| way that IQ tests create and reconfigure a distribution across
| a multi-dimensional vector or dimensional space. It figures out
| what we need in the general case, and allows us to use and
| reason with it, without ever having to do the grunt work or
| arguably impossible task of finding out an actual measure of
| intelligence or some way to untangle the way a brain works.
| tptacek wrote:
| That's a problem with it: its high legibility masks the
| complex (and deceptively muddy) math underneath it. Cosma
| Shalizi's "Statistical Myth" essay is a good dive into this;
| the "general factor" underneath all the different IQ tests is
| more or less a statistical inevitability, reproducing even
| with totally random tests.
| sangnoir wrote:
| > Performance management, as practiced in many large corporations
| in 2024, is an outdated technology that is in need of an update
|
| Author made a couple of fundamental mistakes: the first is they
| assume employees are (or should be) paid according to how much
| they "individually" earned the company. Employers strive to pay
| employees the minimum they can bear, on employer's terms. Those
| terms are information asymmetry and a Gaussian distribution.
| _Fairness_ is the last thing one should expect from employers,
| but being honest about this is not good for morale, so instead,
| they rely on keeping employees uninformed, while the employers
| collude to gather everyone 's remuneration history via the Work
| Number.
|
| The second mistake they made is assume that companies would
| prioritize being lean and trimming the mediocre & bottom 5%.
| There are other considerations, _combined_ productivity is more
| important than having individual superstars working on the
| shiniest features. How much revenue do you think a janitor or
| cafe staffer generates? Close to zero. The same goes for
| engineering. Someone has to do the unglamorous staff, or you end
| up with a dysfunctional company, with amazing talent (on paper).
|
| Edit: there's an infamous graph that shows when aggregate worker
| productivity and average income. The two tracked closely, rising
| in tandem until the 1970s, where they got decoupled. With income
| becoming much flatter, and productivity continuing to rise.
| That's how the world has been for the past 50 years on the macro
| and the micro
| diggan wrote:
| > the first is they assume employees are (or should be) paid
| according to how much they earned the company
|
| From the perspective of a employee and/or human, that does seem
| like the most fair way of distributing what the company earns,
| sans the money that gets reinvested straight back into the
| business itself. But I'd guess that'd be more of a co-
| operative, and less like the typical for-profit company most
| companies are today.
| dingnuts wrote:
| Did you even finish reading the comment you're replying to?
| It explicitly explains why employees who do not generate
| revenue are still valuable.
|
| What you're describing, that money would go to whoever brings
| in revenue directly, is the myopic viewpoint of Sales with an
| emphasis on closing deals with nothing else. If it wasn't for
| the rest of the work, there'd be nothing to sell!
| stoperaticless wrote:
| There is no way to unambiguosly decide who is responsible for
| which earnings.
|
| Hipothetical two people cooperative that produces simple
| hammers. One specializes on wooden part, the other on metal
| part. How much each of them earned to the company? (Or
| producing and selling; or one spending his lifesavings to buy
| pricey hammer-making-equipment while other presses buttons on
| said equipment)
| arctek wrote:
| Goes further than that too, suppose the one working on the
| wooden part is slow and the one on the metal part is
| faster. And surely the value of one part or another is also
| different, even though its the combined value that's
| relevant.
|
| Suppose as well there are a thousand people lined up to
| make the wooden part but hardly any for the metal, then
| surely the ones who work on the metal part will (try to)
| command a higher wage too.
| nkrisc wrote:
| Hopefully you don't get assigned to fixing bugs, because then
| you may not earn any money.
| no_wizard wrote:
| Even with sales based around commission, the most objective
| sort of salary determination, businesses still find ways to
| undercut payouts if they don't think it'll hurt the bottom
| line or employers won't notice
| nuancebydefault wrote:
| If an employee wants to get paid according marginal company
| earnings, they should not be an employee. They should be self
| employed.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| Would you pay a farmer or doctor how much value they give to
| you? You die without their service.
|
| The problem with calculating based on value provided not
| market rate is value provided easily sums to more than one
| unless you consider replacement cost.
| deepnet wrote:
| My takeaway ( and an indication of who actually needs a
| performance review [ e.g. the manager ])
|
| " It's my opinion that the biggest factor in an employee's
| performance - perhaps bigger than the employee's abilities and
| level of effort - is whether their manager set them up for
| success "
| kozikow wrote:
| Or other way around - in bigcorp (or in startup) choosing
| what to work on have much bigger impact than the work you do.
|
| On very low level it's up to your manager. As time goes, even
| as IC you have a lot of agency. It's not just company
| selection, team selection, but also which part of the project
| you are working on and how you are approaching solving it.
|
| Of course "if everyone does this, who will fix the bugs".
| However, the quickest promoted people I've seen are the
| people who were excellent at politics-izing (and sometimes
| foresight) the best work assigned to them.
| groby_b wrote:
| It's not so much that managers need a performance review per
| se, but they need training and useful feedback.
|
| If you've ever worked in tech management, your experience
| likely was "IDK, you're senior, you vaguely have an idea what
| we should do, here, go manage a few folks".
|
| No training, or minimal training. Often with an expectation
| that of course you can still be a strong technical
| contributor, because how much time could managing folks
| possibly take. And then mostly being evaluated based on how
| your reports delivered.
|
| As long as we follow that approach, we'll struggle with
| managers doing the right thing, because they neither have
| learned it, nor have they seen it modelled.
|
| Sure, that _expresses_ in bad manager performance, but often
| nobody can really see it or tell people what they should do
| better. Performance review is too late to fix that. (This is,
| btw, mostly true for employees as well - if you only talk
| about performance 1-4 times a year, people are being set up
| to fail)
| anktor wrote:
| As someone doing this transition, I would love some
| references that help me... Train myself I guess? Other than
| by doing and analyzing myself, which is my current
| situation
|
| I have realized I can give so many tips and reference so
| many great content online to learn math, programming,
| engineering... But find myself missing anything about
| managing
| ec109685 wrote:
| Employers want to pay the minimum, clearly, but until a
| person's salary exceeds the value they bring to a firm, there
| will be other firms willing to pay more and attract that
| talent. So provides some upward pressure on wages, which the
| author addresses:
|
| > Economists will teach you something called the Marginal
| Productivity Theory of Wages, the idea being that the amount of
| money that a company is willing to spend on an employee is
| essentially the value that the company expects to get out of
| their work. This strikes me as mostly true, most of the time,
| and likely to be the case in the corporate world that we're
| considering here.
| bluGill wrote:
| > but until a person's salary exceeds the value they bring to
| a firm, there will be other firms willing to pay more and
| attract that talent
|
| This is false. Supply and demand is a factor. I could clean
| the toilets at the office, if janitors were in short supply
| my boss might setup a rotation schedule - nobody wants to but
| it must be done and so he would pay me. However because
| janitors are cheaper than me he doesn't. This isn't just
| theoretical - McDonald's mostly has the crew clean the floors
| - janitors make more money than McDonalds crew.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| I don't see the contradiction. Janitorial duties are at the
| very worst easy to train any person off the street for. As
| long as people need any sort of minimum wage to survive you
| can find a janitor.
|
| But that also means that, because minimum wage, your salary
| will almost never exceed the value brought to that
| business. Outside of some super crazy regulations of
| cleanliness.
| shkkmo wrote:
| "provides upward pressure on wages" is true, but you simply
| can't get from there to actually demonstrating the "marginal
| producivity theory of wages".
|
| It is pretty clear that the employment market suffers from
| severe inefficiency and information asymmetry. It takes a
| pretty bad economist to look at a market like that and think
| that its pricing is accurate.
|
| Employees often don't know how much value they bring and thus
| are severly limited as counter party and other companies have
| a hard time predicting how much value you'll be able to add
| for the. These (plus many other factors) mean that you should
| expect significant mismatches between pay and performance.
|
| Edit: None of this is evidence against performance being a
| paretor distribution (which makes sense to me), but we're
| gonna need more than just pay data to determine that.
| PittleyDunkin wrote:
| > there will be other firms willing to pay more and attract
| that talent.
|
| ...marginally more. Still nowhere near the actual value their
| labor brings in. We simply don't have a competitive enough
| employer market to provide the upward wage pressure that
| would be sufficient to pay people fairly.
| nox101 wrote:
| If you think you're not getting paid enough you should quit
| and start your own company. The fact that
| google/apple/amazon make 5-10x per employee is not proof
| that you're underpaid. The chef at French Laundry makes
| $$$$$$$, does that mean the apple farmer who supplied the
| apples for $ is underpaid?
| PittleyDunkin wrote:
| > If you think you're not getting paid enough you should
| quit and start your own company.
|
| I'd rather eat a bullet, thanks. I have dignity and I'd
| like to keep it.
|
| > The fact that google/apple/amazon make 5-10x per
| employee is not proof that you're underpaid.
|
| That's exactly what it means.
|
| > The chef at French Laundry makes $$$$$$$, does that
| mean the apple farmer who supplied the apples for $ is
| underpaid?
|
| The chef is paid for their labor. Shareholders contribute
| nothing to society.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| >I have dignity and I'd like to keep it.
|
| it's not about dignity, it's about history. That's why
| those FAANGs offered crazy salaries before tapering off
| some 5 years ago.
|
| The last thing they wanted was for the true 10x'ers to
| become tomorrow's competition, or for others to work for
| such 10x'ers. Because if such an engineer could make a
| 10m/yr business vs being hired for 100k, many would take
| that business opportunity.
|
| >Shareholders contribute nothing to society.
|
| they contribute money, and that's all that matters.
| quality, long term profitability, and worker dignity be
| damned.
| achierius wrote:
| Can you not see how there's a massive barrier to doing
| that? That's exactly why there's not enough of a
| competitive labor market. And at that point, they're not
| doing their job anymore: they're doing the CEO's.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| >Can you not see how there's a massive barrier to doing
| that
|
| yeah, business is hard. FAANG paying a very cushy salary
| is relatively easier. The ambitious would still consider
| such a choice tho, and those are the ones they want to
| keep in their own company instead of as a future
| competitor. They literally paid off a competitive labor
| market.
| ip26 wrote:
| The actual value is complex. The only reason an engineer's
| presence at the company generates $X in revenue is because
| the company already has sales, marketing, finance, legal,
| and all the other necessary functions covered. On their
| own, that engineer's output is worth less. So a light
| switch test does not tell the whole story. The surplus from
| the combined output is deserved by everyone whose input is
| required for those $X, not just the engineer.
|
| In different terms, maybe you leaving costs the company $X.
| But if product engineer Joe Bob left _first_ , maybe _you_
| leaving suddenly only costs the company $Y, where $X > $Y.
| Are you really worth $X?
| ip26 wrote:
| There's a "marriage problem" element not covered here. The
| marginal value of an employee is higher if the team they join
| is small. Eventually, the team reaches a size where more
| employees add little value. Most people understand this.
| However, it follows that the marginal productivity theory of
| wages gets more complicated. They might not be willing to pay
| you the full value they get from your work, for example,
| because they might suspect a replacement (e.g., keeping team
| size constant) would likely produce higher value. Or, they
| might pay you much closer to the full value of your work than
| others because they fear a replacement would likely bring
| lower value.
| HDThoreaun wrote:
| Two problems with this are 1. It is very difficult for
| outside employers to tell is someone is a high performer, and
| 2. Economists also teach to always think on the margins. A
| employees value isnt the amount you bring in more than if
| they didnt exist, it's the amount they bring in over a
| replacement. If people are willing to replace you for $5/hr
| even if you make the company $100/hr you wont get anywhere
| near that amount.
| hemloc_io wrote:
| When I first heard of the Work Number, I thought there's no way
| they stay in business given the Real Page suit.
| HWR_14 wrote:
| What is the RealPage suit?
| hemloc_io wrote:
| Lawsuit for price fixing for landlords using RealPage.
|
| https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-sues-
| realp...
| HWR_14 wrote:
| Thanks.
| thrwaway1985882 wrote:
| > The second mistake they made is assume that companies would
| prioritize being lean and trimming the mediocre & bottom 5%.
| There are other considerations, combined productivity is more
| important than having individual superstars working on the
| shiniest features.
|
| I'll add a perverse incentive too that I've talked about
| elsewhere - hiring is a goddamn mess right now.
|
| If I trim the bottom 5% of my org (in my case, 2-3 engineers),
| I may not get a backfill for them. Or I'll have to drop their
| level from L5->L4 to make finance happy, or hire overseas or
| convert a FTE to a contractor.
|
| I also have to be ready for the potential of RIFs happening,
| which means having an instantly identifiable bottom 5% puts me
| at the advantage of being ready when my boss says "give me your
| names".
|
| So the time value of a staffed engineer is way higher right now
| than it might be in a few months. It'll never be zero, because
| proactively managing people out makes all of our managers
| happy. But for now, I definitely need my low performers.
| nilkn wrote:
| I think the value of low performers becomes much more obvious
| when you separate out the concept of a toxic employee. Toxic
| employees hurt the team or organization whether low
| performing or high performing, and with rare exceptions it's
| almost always worth getting rid of them. Toxic employees are
| the people getting into arguments and conflicts all the time,
| dragging others down constantly. Or they're the managers who
| cause attrition or can't retain their team or lie to their
| peers and own leadership until it catches up to them, often
| dramatically.
|
| However, low performers are not always toxic. Often, low
| performers are just kind of lazy, or they take longer than
| they should to finish their work, or they take too long to
| reply to emails or messages, or their work needs extra review
| and checks and balances, or they are only capable of
| delivering on a relatively small set of fairly simple tasks,
| or they just want to work on the same part of the same
| product forever and can't emotionally handle change, or ...
|
| Non-toxic low performers can be great because they'll often
| do the unglamorous work for you for relatively low pay, and
| all you have to do is not bother them too much. The worst
| thing you can do with non-toxic low performers is try to
| force them into high performers. It won't work, because
| they're either not capable or they just _don't care_. For
| some people, their work just isn't that important to them,
| and there's nothing you can do to change their perception of
| the relative importance of their job to the other aspects of
| their life. What might look like low performance in a
| corporate environment can just be someone setting boundaries
| and refusing to let work infringe too much on their personal
| life.
| thrwaway1985882 wrote:
| This is a great point. Toxicity is entirely orthogonal to
| performance. And you rarely have to worry about toxic low
| performers: if you're unlucky enough to hire them, they
| don't stay around for long.
|
| But toxic top performers are IME one of the biggest
| challenges a manager will have to deal with. You have to
| root them out the moment they land in an organization
| because given enough they'll push out the non-toxic top
| performers, leaving you with a toxic asshole and a bunch of
| flunkies. And you have to convince everyone outside the
| team that yes, they get things done, but they're enough of
| an asshole that you'd rather risk hiring someone to deliver
| less but also destroy less.
|
| All this reminds me of the quote attributed to everyone
| under the sun (Clausewitz, various US civil war generals,
| Omar Bradley, you name 'em) but apparently was said by Kurt
| von Hammerstein-Equord[0]
|
| > There are clever, hardworking, stupid, and lazy officers.
| Usually two characteristics are combined. Some are clever
| and hardworking; their place is the General Staff. The next
| ones are stupid and lazy; they make up 90 percent of every
| army and are suited to routine duties. Anyone who is both
| clever and lazy is qualified for the highest leadership
| duties, because he possesses the mental clarity and
| strength of nerve necessary for difficult decisions. One
| must beware of anyone who is both stupid and hardworking;
| he must not be entrusted with any responsibility because he
| will always only cause damage.
|
| Turns out this problem is quite old, indeed.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurt_von_Hammerstein-
| Equord#Cl...
| Retric wrote:
| > What might look like low performance in a corporate
| environment can just be someone setting boundaries and
| refusing to let work infringe too much on their personal
| life.
|
| Another is poor fit between the employee and the job. One
| the lowest performers in a role can sometime be a great in
| another because they do/don't care about clean code, long
| hours, spelling / grammar issues, minor aesthetic issues,
| minor bugs, speed, etc etc.
|
| The universally perfect employee basically doesn't exist as
| much as organizations want everybody to be interchangeable
| cogs.
| _DeadFred_ wrote:
| Or the fit between employee and manager. I've come into
| many teams where the employee on a PIP went to being one
| of my best performers while those I was given the ravest
| reviews for were just mediocre under me. Or even just
| cultural. I had to change how I managed/my expectations
| as I moved positions around the country or when offshore
| teams were brought on.
|
| I agree with your shocking premise that people are not
| machines and expand it to include that they are also not
| numbers in a spreadsheet or HR system.
| jahewson wrote:
| I don't think it's helpful to use inflammatory labels like
| "toxic". There's no such thing. It's an unfalsifiable
| claim.
| codeduck wrote:
| > There's no such thing
|
| This is your opinion. I have worked with and managed
| 'toxic' employees. They are very much a thing.
| alexjplant wrote:
| ...what? It's not a claim to be falsified, it's a
| hyperbolic metaphor. I don't particularly like it either
| as it's been thrown around so much as to have lost much
| of its meaning (like "gaslighting", "gatekeeping",
| "narcissistic", etc.) but it's absolutely a thing. If you
| call a coworker who doesn't perform while falsely
| accusing you of incompetence in public Slack channels
| "toxic" then everybody knows exactly what you mean.
| scubbo wrote:
| There very much is such a thing, and they provide an
| accurate definition of it in their comment.
| kergonath wrote:
| > It's an unfalsifiable claim.
|
| It is very falsifiable. Take that employee out of the
| team and look at the outcome.
| alsetmusic wrote:
| > What might look like low performance in a corporate
| environment can just be someone setting boundaries and
| refusing to let work infringe too much on their personal
| life.
|
| After killing myself at a FAANG because it was what was
| expected (to my mental health detriment), I have exactly
| this attitude since. At the end of the day, I'm done. I'm
| gone. I don't care. Even while I'm there, I'm only doing
| the amount outlined in the job and nothing extra. When I
| have a task to complete, I do my best to do it well. But I
| also don't care and don't sweat making sure it's perfect.
|
| This has worked out great. I think I do a good enough job
| to be viewed as pretty good at what I do. That's good
| enough for me. I don't want advancement. I don't want more
| responsibility. Just give me a cost-of-living bump every
| year and we're good.
| Aurornis wrote:
| > But for now, I definitely need my low performers.
|
| Firing people if you can't get backfill is illogical,
| obviously. Once a company institutes a hiring freeze, low
| performers get locked in until forced layoffs. You'll see
| some people stop working and start job searching because they
| know that any contribution they make at all is better for
| their manager than having them fired.
|
| However, deliberately keeping low performers around as a
| buffer becomes a self-own on a longer time horizon. Smart
| managers will negotiate hiring exceptions to replace a low
| performer now rather than keep that headcount occupied for
| safety. Yes, it's frustrating to have to lay off a good
| performer, but it's more frustrating for everyone to have a
| poor performer dragging the team down for some invisible game
| of chess that goes on for potentially years without
| resolution.
| thrwaway1985882 wrote:
| > However, deliberately keeping low performers around as a
| buffer becomes a self-own on a longer time horizon. Smart
| managers will negotiate hiring exceptions to replace a low
| performer now rather than keep that headcount occupied for
| safety.
|
| This is a "the times are good" play, and it can absolutely
| work. But the real trick is understanding
|
| > Once a company institutes a hiring freeze
|
| that if you as a manager are reacting here, the die is
| already cast. There are plenty of unofficial "we're frozen
| but aren't saying it out loud" moves I & peers in other
| companies are seeing right now: downleveling, additional
| approval gates added to slow things down to a more
| favorable time, you name it.
|
| Yes, over a long enough time horizon ballast will weigh
| down the boat, but theta is on my side right now.
| edanm wrote:
| > I'll add a perverse incentive too that I've talked about
| elsewhere - hiring is a goddamn mess right now.
|
| Not to take away from any of your points...
|
| But this statement has been made every year for as long as
| I've been in the industry (about twenty years). I suspect
| it's been made much before that too.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| I guess it's messy but it's not worth the cost to fix, in
| that case.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| Just as a curiosity, are those 2-3 people "underperformers"
| or simply "Not as high performers"? In an org that size I can
| imagine everyone pulls their weight, but there will simply be
| others who are inevitably more productive for a variety of
| reasons.
|
| >hiring is a goddamn mess right now.
|
| Any insight you can give on why? I know enough from the
| hirees end, but how's it on the other side?
| abeppu wrote:
| It's also just embarrassing that this is supposed to be a data
| science blog about employee performance and the only non-
| simulated data directly presented or discussed is the US wage
| distribution, where the author has just cavalierly marked the
| x-axis as "Performance". There's all this spew, and the author
| makes claims about what good data scientists do ... and there's
| no data in this discussion that's directly relevant to their
| rambling claims.
| wombatpm wrote:
| That's on par with most data science projects I've seen in my
| corporate job.
| efitz wrote:
| I have a crazy idea.
|
| If a corporation lays off any people in a particular job
| category/title, that corporation should not be allocated ANY
| H1B visas for that job category/title for the next year.
|
| If a corporation institutes any policy that requires decimation
| (or any other statistic-based termination program) of employees
| with a particular job category or title, or if IN EFFECT they
| perform this (because they will just hide it otherwise), then
| they will not be allocated any H1B visas for that job category
| or title, for the next year following any such act.
|
| In essence, the point here is that if a corporation decides it
| can live without X% of their workforce, then they don't get to
| go bring in foreign workers. The H1B program is to help find
| workers for positions that can't be filled; if you're laying
| off or mass firing people then obviously you CAN find people to
| fill those jobs.
| polishdude20 wrote:
| The play devil's advocate, presumably they're fired because
| they didn't meet standards (in whatever vague way they can
| justify) and they want foreign workers because local workers
| didn't meet those standards.
| jdbernard wrote:
| Parent's point was about lay-offs, not firings. I'm very
| comfortable with their suggestion. Make the company be
| explicit. If it's a firing ("they are underperforming")
| then sure, that doesn't affect H1B eligibility, but you
| have to actually fire them. If it is a layoff ("we don't
| need those jobs") then why are you turning around and
| hiring for them immediately afterwards?
| fullwaza wrote:
| If some % of workers were hired that didn't meet standards,
| then it seems like those doing the hiring are the ones that
| need to be replaced first.
| forty wrote:
| In France, if you lay off people collectively for economical
| reasons, those people have the right to be re-hired first
| should the company open jobs that are compatible with their
| qualifications within 1 year after the layoff (it's called
| "re-hire priority").
| betaby wrote:
| Interesting. Is that a law or a typical contract term?
| forty wrote:
| It's labour law. If you want to read some french law ^^ h
| ttps://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/codes/id/LEGISCTA0000061985
| 40
| whatever1 wrote:
| I think this is true already. Companies who lay off do not
| get to sponsor for green card. I am not sure about h1b
| coredog64 wrote:
| There's a 6 month window between layoffs and PERM filings
| (green card). Employers can still submit PERM filings, but
| AIUI, doing so risks audits.
| HeyLaughingBoy wrote:
| It's entirely possible to need to lay off people for one type
| of work while being unable to staff up for a different
| skillset. I would expect software developers, of all people,
| to understand that we're not commodities.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| I'd also expect that Software Engineers can ramp up
| surprisingly fast in different skillsets as needed. But
| that requires time to train (independently or otherwise),
| and no one wants to do that anymore.
| Aurornis wrote:
| > In essence, the point here is that if a corporation decides
| it can live without X% of their workforce
|
| The open secret is that layoffs are also used as a gentle way
| to fire low performers.
|
| By including people in layoffs, you can give them a
| potentially very generous severance package and you allow
| them the courtesy of saying they were laid off as opposed to
| being fired. They get mixed in with all of the good
| performers who were laid off due to budget cuts.
|
| Putting a lot of restrictions on a company that does layoffs
| creates a perverse incentive to fire these people explicitly
| instead of giving them a gentle landing with a layoff. You
| would see far more people fired instead of "laid off".
|
| At the extreme, you incentivize companies to start firing
| people to make budget cuts.
|
| So, this is actually a very bad idea. You do not want to
| start putting handcuffs on companies who do layoffs instead
| of constant firings.
| JoshTriplett wrote:
| I think it's exceptionally unlikely that companies are
| doing layoffs instead of firing _for the benefit of
| employees_. You 're holding up reasons like severance and
| saving face.
|
| From everything I've seen, the much more common reason is
| that firing someone typically entails a much longer paper
| trail for CYA reasons. Batching them up and including them
| in the next round of layoffs is easier and safer.
| efitz wrote:
| Severance packages _always_ requires signing a "I give up
| my right to sue you" document. It is 100% about lawsuit
| reduction and 0% about being gentle with employees.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| >Putting a lot of restrictions on a company that does
| layoffs creates a perverse incentive to fire these people
| explicitly instead of giving them a gentle landing with a
| layoff. You would see far more people fired instead of
| "laid off".
|
| Given that we long since decoupled terminations for being
| based on performance, I'd rather employers just be honest.
|
| But they won't do that because they don't want any risk of
| lawsuits. Even if they are truly low performing, firing a
| pregnant woman or someone who happens to be an outlier race
| in the company is just too easy a setup for scrutiny. I've
| seen plenty of those kinds of people mixed up in these
| layoffs as well.
| hipadev23 wrote:
| Why can't people just suck, why does it have to turn into
| some anti-immigrant narrative.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| >Why can't people just suck
|
| Because most people after a few years of experience do not
| simply "suck" in a vacuum. If you need to get rid of 2-3
| people it might be a "suck problem". if you need to get rid
| of 200-300 people it's a more systematic issue or incentive
| being driving such mass actions.
| nox101 wrote:
| There is arguably no way to judge "fairness". Employee A gets
| assigned to work on LLMs. Employee B gets assigned to work on
| Android 9/Mac OS 12 security patches. Another example includes
| unforeseen difficulties. I have a friend that signed up to
| implement a feature. That feature would have taken 1-2 weeks in
| any standalone app, but, he happened to be on web browser team
| and the number of edge cases that came up and the amount of
| back and forth between standards committees meant it ended up
| taking 2 years. He was judged poorly even though all of it was
| out of his control because everyone though it should have
| taking 1-2 weeks.
|
| I feel like I'd prefer some balance. There are superstars. We
| know them. We can easily point them out in peer reviews. But,
| we're also a team, there's lots to do, not everyone gets to
| work on the high profile easy to identify "impact" parts.
| wcfrobert wrote:
| Completely agree. Yes, great engineers tend to be compensated
| well, but only slightly more than the median performer. In
| other words, a 10x engineer isn't getting paid 10x more. It's
| probably more like 1.5x to 2x. If we somehow invent a magical
| way to track productivity numbers exactly, I suspect we'd see
| something closer to Price's Law [1] (Pareto distribution) which
| is essentially what this post is about, where something like
| 20% of workers contribute to 80% of the results. However, that
| doesn't means the other 80% is expendable which relates to your
| second point.
|
| Paying what employees "earn" for the company is incompatible
| with our economic system where companies want to be profitable.
| Paying employees what they "deserve" based on contribution is
| probably also undesirable. I think you'd get the same income
| inequality dynamics but within companies. There is an averaging
| effect when you work at large corporations. That's either a
| good thing or a bad thing depending on the person. Individual
| contributions are averaged out, but so are responsibilities. I
| think Paul Graham articulated this wonderfully in his essay on
| what a job is and why some prefer to work for startups [2].
|
| [1] https://www.kienbaum.com/blog/prices-law-and-the-trouble-
| of-...
|
| [2] https://paulgraham.com/wealth.html.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| > Employers strive to pay employees the minimum they can bear,
| on employer's terms
|
| I don't think it's worth thinking like this. An employee's
| salary is floored by their value to any company, and ceilinged
| by their value to the company currently employing them.
| sangnoir wrote:
| The absolute numbers are hard to accurately calculate for
| every employee, and change all the time, so at best, the
| limits are fuzzy.
|
| That said, do you care to guess where in this floor-to-
| ceiling range the employers' ideal would fall? Does that
| answer conflict with my thesis?
| robertlagrant wrote:
| Would you care to guess where in the range the employee's
| ideal would fall? The answer is missing from your thesis.
| Aurornis wrote:
| > Employers strive to pay employees the minimum they can bear,
| on employer's terms.
|
| This is one of the things I try to drive home when I mentor
| young people. Employment is a market and it responds to the
| forces of supply and demand. Never think that your relationship
| with a company is anything other than a business transaction.
|
| It's a hard lesson for young people to accept these days, but
| everything becomes much more clear once you stop fighting the
| idea.
| torginus wrote:
| The thing is, even if performance was Gaussian, even if we run
| with the following 2 statements:
|
| - IQ is gaussian
|
| - IQ correllates well with performance
|
| hiring practices would probably produce an employee population
| that went through some right-curve cutoff test, meaning most
| people would be much closer to the hiring threshold, with a few
| positive outliers.
|
| For a given arbitrarily chosen values, you could massage the
| distribution and make it look Pareto, but I'd be hard pressed
| to come up with a reason why it makes rational sense.
| pfooti wrote:
| Those two assumptions are not particularly well-supported by
| data or modern thought on capabilities. Even the construct of
| "IQ" is probably a post-hoc explanation of data rather than a
| predictive thing. If you want an hours-long discussion of
| that in the context of the book, The Bell Curve, have a look
| at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UBc7qBS1Ujo
| robocat wrote:
| > mistakes: the first is they assume employees are (or should
| be) paid according to how much they "individually" earned the
| company
|
| From the article: Economists will teach you
| something called the Marginal Productivity Theory of Wages, the
| idea being that the amount of money that a company is willing
| to spend on an employee is essentially the value that the
| company expects to get out of their work. This strikes me as
| mostly true, most of the time
|
| From internet: The marginal productivity theory
| of wages states that under perfect competition, workers of the
| same skill and efficiency will earn a wage equal to the value
| of their marginal product. The marginal product is the
| additional output from employing one more worker while keeping
| other factors constant. However, the theory has limitations as
| it assumes perfect competition, homogeneous labor, and other
| unrealistic conditions. In reality, competition is imperfect,
| labor is not perfectly mobile, and other factors like capital
| and management efficiency affect productivity.
|
| The marginal argument is confusing to me.
| setopt wrote:
| > The marginal argument is confusing to me.
|
| When economists say "marginal" they usually mean what an
| engineer would call "derivative". So "marginal cost", for
| example, is usually "d(cost)/d(production)" or
| "d(cost)/d(sales)". Similarly, marginal productivity means
| "d(productivity)/d(workers)".
|
| Usually this pops up in ideal economics because under ideal
| circumstances, maximizing revenue and productivity and so on
| means "set the derivative of something to zero" to find the
| optimum point.
|
| (Disclaimer: I'm a physicist not an economist, but I've taken
| an intro economics course. The above was my main takeaway
| from that...)
| robocat wrote:
| That's very insightful. Thank you.
| renewiltord wrote:
| If you look at those graphs you'll see a more telling tale. US
| productivity has skyrocketed but Europeans are not that
| productive in comparison and are stagnant. Might help with
| understanding what's going on.
| hnuser123456 wrote:
| I believe the graph you're referring to is here:
| https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/
| jez wrote:
| Also: the specific choice of the year 1971 (as opposed to say
| "the 70s" or "the late 60s") is usually meant to call
| attention to the fact that in 1971 the US abandoned the gold
| standard for the US dollar.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nixon_shock
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| >. How much revenue do you think a janitor or cafe staffer
| generates? Close to zero. The same goes for engineering.
| Someone has to do the unglamorous staff, or you end up with a
| dysfunctional company, with amazing talent (on paper).
|
| There's two ways to make a profit. Gain more revenue, and not
| lose more revenue. Those kinds of staff are the latter, in
| addition to other aspects like HR (preventing
| lawsuits/settlements which are expensive).
|
| But yes, there's so many hidden factors on measuring
| "productivity". That's why stack ranking is a bit stupid in the
| long run. Some people aren't just producing value but bringing
| out productivity in others. But that's an opportunity cost for
| a stacked system. Such individuals should be considered for
| management, not kicked out.
|
| >The two tracked closely, rising in tandem until the 1970s,
| where they got decoupled. With income becoming much flatter,
| and productivity continuing to rise. That's how the world has
| been for the past 50 years on the macro and the micro
|
| Yup, very well known that we really should be close to that
| ideal John Maynard Keynes predicted all the way in 1930 of 15
| hour workweeks by 2030. Instead, I believe the average work
| week in the US is 50 hours and it's still a very controversial
| battle to get to a 4 day work week.
| konschubert wrote:
| > How much revenue do you think a janitor or cafe staffer
| generates? Close to zero.
|
| This completely depends on how you do your internal revenue
| accounting.
| TrainedMonkey wrote:
| Employee performance MEASUREMENT appears to be Gaussian
| distributed. To my first simple, and let's be real probably
| somewhat wrong, approximation there are roughly 3 things that go
| into it.
|
| 1. There is a certain skill in communicating all the important
| things you've done, we shall lump likability + politicking into
| this one for convenience.
|
| 2. There is a premium that is placed on shiny new features and
| saving the day heroics. A lot less priority is placed on
| refactoring and solving the problems before they require heroics.
|
| 3. Finally there are individual's technical and self-management
| skills. I.E. it's important to work on important things and be
| good at it.
| philipov wrote:
| > How much revenue do you think a janitor or cafe staffer
| generates? Close to zero. The same goes for engineering. Someone
| has to do the unglamorous staff, or you end up with a
| dysfunctional company, with amazing talent (on paper).
|
| If the company would be dysfunctional without that janitor or
| software engineer, and not bring in as much revenue as a result,
| it sounds like the model that attributes close to zero revenue to
| them is already dysfunctional. If the company can't function
| without the janitor, then a significant portion of the revenue of
| the company should be attributed to them.
| sangnoir wrote:
| Sound like you're expecting employers to strive for fairness.
| Instead, they are striving for profits for the capital class.
| The labor class gets the minimum possible amount to reach the
| shareholders primary goal.
| philipov wrote:
| It sounds like _you 're_ confusing what they do currently and
| what the system should be set up to encourage instead. That
| things are broken right now is not a valid argument in favor
| of the status quo. The point you make only proves why it is
| so important that unions should have as much economic power
| as corporations do, so that the buy and sell sides of the
| labor market have negotiation parity.
| sangnoir wrote:
| I'm being descriptive, bot prescriptive: I'm stating what
| the priorities are under a capitalist system without the
| rose-colored glasses offered by the Just-world fallacy.
| philipov wrote:
| In a well-functioning capitalistic system, the sell side
| of the labor market has equal power with the buy side.
| When the buy and sell sides of a market have a huge power
| imbalance, this leads to market failure, which is
| contrary to the goals of a capitalist system, as it
| results in inefficient allocation of capital.
| sangnoir wrote:
| Where can one find examples of such a well-functioning
| capitalistic system? Or is it a thought-experiment
| irrational wrote:
| Is it Q4 at a lot of companies? How many companies align their
| fiscal calendar with the yearly calendar? Our Q4 is March-May.
| spyckie2 wrote:
| So...
|
| 1) treat poor performers as bad hires and ignore them in your
| dataset
|
| 2) treat 10x performers as needing to be promoted and also ignore
| them in your data
|
| 3) treat everyone else as relatively equal
|
| ...and use "Pareto distribution" and "no one has mentioned this
| before" to write a blog post?
|
| Is the point of the article to get people who disagree with 10%
| corporate culling a pseudo intellectual economic buzzword
| argument to stroke their hatred of an inefficient hr practice? If
| so:
|
| 1) 10% culling in performance review is a mechanism to cull "bad
| hires". I find it difficult to understand how the author can
| argue it's a bad practice and then state that you cull bad hires
| from your dataset without thinking that they are the same thing
| or at least largely overlapping.
|
| 2) If the author is proposing to separate performance review,
| culling bad hires, and promotions, into 3 separate systems and
| assume no overlap, he should think through the structural issues
| more. While it's possible to design a management structure where
| the organization is at a constant state of no bad hires, all
| 10xers promoted, that is putting a lot of responsibility on
| individual managers to run review, culling and promotion by
| themselves at a very high level. It's brittle - a few bad
| managers not running the system can easily leave your
| organization bloated with bad hires and no fallback (fallback =
| performance review process).
|
| 3) The system of performance review is equally about risk
| management to the business as it is about rewarding your
| employees. IMO, the author's framing simplifies the problem too
| much and pushes the complexity out for other people to deal with.
| It's the kind of thinking that is damaging to organizations... I
| wonder if there is a process to cull this kind of thinking from
| your org... wait what time of year is it??
| 29athrowaway wrote:
| I guess developers should have a pay structure similar to sales
| when you make part of your money from bonuses tied to results.
| But those results are hard to evaluate because shipping something
| fast can have bugs found after the reward date.
| wavemode wrote:
| This concept is not new - see [0].
|
| There's ample research that Welchian stack ranking, and assuming
| a Gaussian distribution of employee performance, is not well-
| founded. Even its original pioneers (General Electric) have
| abandoned the practice (see [1]).
|
| Not sure why there are so many commenters here defending the
| Gaussian model. Most researchers at this point agree that a
| pareto distribution is more realistic.
|
| [0]: https://hbr.org/2022/01/we-need-to-let-go-of-the-bell-curve
|
| [1]: https://qz.com/428813/ge-performance-review-strategy-shift
| uoaei wrote:
| I suspect you can dig into any metric here and find that they are
| explicitly determined in terms of an assumption of underlying
| normality.
| _vaporwave_ wrote:
| > a helpful order of magnitude estimate is that the hiring
| process all told costs the company approximately a year's salary
|
| It feels weird to gloss over this since transaction costs this
| high have a huge impact on how the system should be designed.
| igorkraw wrote:
| The author looks at "observables" of performance without
| considering whether there might be confounders such as those
| discussed in great nuance here
| https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/joes.12328 .
|
| He cites similar work by William Shockley who taught both
| electrical engineering and scientific racism at Stanford
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Shockley (no swipe at the
| author, just pointing at the biased motiviations of some of the
| researchers foundational to the idea of "high performers").
|
| In general, when you see pareto structures or power laws, you
| should think of compound or cascade effects, which in human
| structures generally means some form of social mediation.
| Affinity for a desireable skill might be gaussian, but the
| selection process means that the people who _get_ to do that
| skill might become pareto shaped because if you aren't much
| better than the next guy, you wouldn't stably stay at the top.
| Similar logic can hold for other expressions.
|
| In general, I wish more people would read
| https://blackwells.co.uk/bookshop/product/Causality-by-Judea...
| or at least the more accessible https://mixtape.scunning.com/
| before starting to conjecture from data about social systems -
| the math will tell you what you can and cannot speculate on.
|
| (fun exercise: draw the causal models of IQ in
| https://dagitty.net/ and ponder the results)
| drc500free wrote:
| I've recently been working with a lot of service center
| productivity data. Staff productivity (customers/hour) is pretty
| close to a gaussian, with some skew towards many slight
| underperformers and few overperformers.
|
| However, any single customer interaction is exponential or
| weibull distributed.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| It depends on the job. If you are interested in the American
| caste system you should read this classic
|
| https://www.amazon.com/Remember-me-God-Myron-Kaufmann/dp/B00...
|
| Which tells the story of a Jewish person who fails to persevere
| against prejudice in a multifaceted and sensitive way. In one
| scene he gets a job as a bank teller and then realizes in some
| jobs you've got the potential to screw up but no potential to
| distinguish yourself. The world needs people to milk cows every
| morning, a job you can screw up but not do it 10x better than
| competent, there is no Pareto or other "exceptional events"
| distributions for many essential jobs. ER doctors, taxicab
| drivers, astronauts, etc.
|
| (Productivity is a product of the system + the people)
|
| I worked on one system that had a 40 minute build if you wanted
| it to be reliable, the people I picked it up from could not build
| it reliably which is why the project has been going in circles
| for 1.5 years before I showed up. With no assistance (and orders
| that I was not supposed to spend time speeding up my build
| because it didn't directly help the customer) I got it to a 20
| minute build.
|
| Other folks on the team thought I was a real dope because my
| build took too long and I was always complaining but _they
| couldn't build it reliably at all._. I mas two major releases of
| a product with revolutionary performance in one year at which
| point I felt that I'd done the honorable thing and that I'd feel
| less backlash anywhere else whether or not I was creating more
| value --- so I moved on, and was told by recruiters that they
| hadn't found a replacement for me in six months.
|
| Had the place I was working at had a 2 minute build they might
| never had hired me because they would have had the product ready
| long before.
| hammock wrote:
| Why would performance be pareto distributed? Not saying it isn't,
| just wish we would unpack that idea a bit more.
|
| IQ and other personality traits are gaussian, with which I would
| expect performance to be correlated
|
| But, the mythical "10X employee" would seem to imply pareto,
| along with 80/20 notions of both personnel and an individual
| employee's day-to-day workload
|
| How do we resolve this dichotomy?
| estebarb wrote:
| Some years ago I started doing graphs of code contributions
| across the year (yeah, wrong thing to measure, I know). A funny
| thing is that people considered "high performers" could be made
| the worse performers depending on how you cut the data.
| Basically, performance had a wave behavior, and nobody was at
| 100% all the time.
|
| That is a good argument for diverse hiring: people will have bad
| days/seasons, fact of life. If the team is diverse is less
| probable that those bad days will correlate between different
| employees.
| thesz wrote:
| > IQ is Gaussian. The Big Five Personality Trait known as
| Conscientiousness is likewise Gaussian. For what it's worth,
| human height is also Gaussian...
|
| Height cannot be negative, thus, it is not Gaussian. IQ cannot be
| negative too. Great many things that most people think are
| Gaussians, are not.
|
| One of such distributions that describe one-sided values, log-
| normal distribution (logarithms of values are distributed
| normally) has interesting property that for some d values
| x=mean+d are more probable than values x=mean-d (heavy tail).
| Also, sum of log-normal-distributed values does not converge to
| Gaussian distribution.
| hinkley wrote:
| > IQ cannot be negative
|
| Have you been keeping up with current events?
| hinkley wrote:
| Doesn't quite work with Heart Shaped Box, but ok.
| soniman wrote:
| It's the marginal dollar that contributes profit so the marginal
| employees are actually the most profitable.
| directevolve wrote:
| I had assumed stack ranking was specifically designed to force
| managers to fire low performers, without relying on their
| individual judgment. Since nobody likes to fire, this overcomes
| the inertia, and since relying on personal judgment exposed you
| to legal risk and principle agent problems, a simple rule was
| substituted. The author's proposal to go back to managerial
| discretion would of course be incompatible with that intention.
|
| I do wonder whether those implementing stack ranking are really
| that committed to a particular statistical model of employee
| productivity, or if they're trying to solve a human and legal
| problem with an algorithm.
| cynicalpeace wrote:
| If you take this as true- what does it imply?
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