151–160 of 341 posts
However, any single customer interaction is exponential or weibull distributed.
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…
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)?
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.
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…
> 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?
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).
"Hey wait - is [arbitrary metrics] Gaussian distributed?" =3
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 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.
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.
"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.
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.
> 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…
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.
> 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…
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 ju…
> 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 e…
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.
"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…
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.