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Hey, wait – is employee performance Gaussian distributed?

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Re: Hey, wait – is employee performance Gaussian distributed?

#101

Post by jppope »

ianbicking wrote: post #67

"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…

Correct. IQ isn't an effective measurement of intelligence as is typically stated. It is (at best) a measurement of learning disabilities.

Re: Hey, wait – is employee performance Gaussian distributed?

#102

Post by nkrisc »

diggan wrote: post #76
sangnoir wrote: post #70

> Performance management, as practiced in many large corporations in 2024, is an outdated technology that is in need of an update Author made a couple of fundamental mistakes: the first is they assume employees are (or should be) paid according to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…

> 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 ar…

Hopefully you don’t get assigned to fixing bugs, because then you may not earn any money.

Re: Hey, wait – is employee performance Gaussian distributed?

#103

Post by logicchains »

FredPret wrote: post #77
ianbicking wrote: post #67

"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…

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 achi…

>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.

Re: Hey, wait – is employee performance Gaussian distributed?

#104

Post by efitz »

Eikon wrote: post #71
jedberg wrote: post #65

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 com…

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…

> 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.

Re: Hey, wait – is employee performance Gaussian distributed?

#105

Post by philipov »

sangnoir wrote: post #99
philipov wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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.

Re: Hey, wait – is employee performance Gaussian distributed?

#106

Post by sapiogram »

ianbicking wrote: post #67

"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…

> 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.

Re: Hey, wait – is employee performance Gaussian distributed?

#107

Post by spyckie2 »

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??

Re: Hey, wait – is employee performance Gaussian distributed?

#108

Post by deepnet »

sangnoir wrote: post #70

> 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…

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 “

Re: Hey, wait – is employee performance Gaussian distributed?

#109

Post by liontwist »

jppope wrote: post #101
ianbicking wrote: post #67

"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…

Correct. IQ isn't an effective measurement of intelligence as is typically stated. It is (at best) a measurement of learning disabilities.

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.

Re: Hey, wait – is employee performance Gaussian distributed?

#110

Post by MilanTodorovic »

jonas21 wrote: post #93
dangus wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 reali…

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?"

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.
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