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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?

#161

Post by HWR_14 »

hemloc_io wrote: post #121
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 Performance management, as practiced in many large corporations in 2024, is an outdated technology that is in need of an update Author made a couple of fundamental mistakes: the first is they assume employees are (or should be) paid according to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…

When I first heard of the Work Number, I thought there's no way they stay in business given the Real Page suit.

What is the RealPage suit?

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

#162

Post by nuancebydefault »

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 Performance management, as practiced in many large corporations in 2024, is an outdated technology that is in need of an update Author made a couple of fundamental mistakes: the first is they assume employees are (or should be) paid according to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

If an employee wants to get paid according marginal company earnings, they should not be an employee. They should be self employed.

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

#163

Post by jprete »

CSMastermind wrote: post #160
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…

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 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.

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

#164

Post by forty »

efitz wrote: post #157
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…

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…

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").

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

#165

Post by nox101 »

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…

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.

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

#166

Post by wetpaws »

polishdude20 wrote: post #158
efitz wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

[dead]

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

#167

Post by nox101 »

PittleyDunkin wrote: post #147
ec109685 wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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?

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

#168

Post by jdbernard »

polishdude20 wrote: post #158
efitz wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

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?

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

#169

Post by fullwaza »

polishdude20 wrote: post #158
efitz wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

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.

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

#170

Post by whatever1 »

efitz wrote: post #157
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…

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…

I think this is true already. Companies who lay off do not get to sponsor for green card. I am not sure about h1b
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