Hey, wait – is employee performance Gaussian distributed? • Hacker News Board

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

#181

Post by PaulHoule » Mon, Nov 25, 2024, 7:30 PM UTC

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.

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

#182

Post by Aurornis » Mon, Nov 25, 2024, 7:31 PM UTC

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 Performance management, as practiced in many large corporations in 2024, is an outdated technology that is in need of an update Author made a couple of fundamental mistakes: the first is they assume employees are (or should be) paid according to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

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

#183

Post by Aurornis » Mon, Nov 25, 2024, 7:33 PM UTC

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 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.

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

#184

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Nov 25, 2024, 7:35 PM UTC

withinboredom wrote: post #63

munk-a wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 sever…

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.

[deleted]

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

#185

Post by lokar » Mon, Nov 25, 2024, 7:35 PM UTC

jprete wrote: post #163

CSMastermind wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

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

#186

Post by munk-a » Mon, Nov 25, 2024, 7:36 PM UTC

withinboredom wrote: post #63

munk-a wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 sever…

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.

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.

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

#187

Post by FredPret » Mon, Nov 25, 2024, 7:36 PM UTC

groby_b wrote: post #136

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. 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 ca…

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.

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

#188

Post by Aurornis » Mon, Nov 25, 2024, 7:37 PM UTC

thrwaway1985882 wrote: post #142

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 e…

> 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.

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

#189

Post by jahewson » Mon, Nov 25, 2024, 7:37 PM UTC

nilkn wrote: post #159

thrwaway1985882 wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

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…

I don’t think it’s helpful to use inflammatory labels like “toxic”. There’s no such thing. It’s an unfalsifiable claim.

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

#190

Post by torginus » Mon, Nov 25, 2024, 7:38 PM UTC

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 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.