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Hey, wait – is employee performance Gaussian distributed?

timdellinger.substack.com

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

#141

Post by shkkmo »

logicchains wrote: post #103
FredPret wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 complexi…

> 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.

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

#142

Post by thrwaway1985882 »

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 Performance management, as practiced in many large corporations in 2024, is an outdated technology that is in need of an update Author made a couple of fundamental mistakes: the first is they assume employees are (or should be) paid according to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

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

#143

Post by lifeisstillgood »

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…

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

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

#144

Post by mjburgess »

liontwist wrote: post #109
jppope wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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

#145

Post by mjburgess »

EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK wrote: post #133
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…

Sum of N independent similarly distributed variables (questions), will tend to be normally distributed, that the central limit theorem, no need to manufacture anything.

They're not independent.

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

#146

Post by groby_b »

bhouston wrote: post #30

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…

> 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...

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

#147

Post by PittleyDunkin »

ec109685 wrote: post #114
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…

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…

> 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.

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

#148

Post by jedberg »

brabel wrote: post #66
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…

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, pe…

> 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.

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

#149

Post by jedberg »

lolinder wrote: post #132
brabel wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, pe…

> 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, childle…

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.

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

#150

Post by abeppu »

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…

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.
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