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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?

#191

Post by robocat »

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 Performance management, as practiced in many large corporations in 2024, is an outdated technology that is in need of an update Author made a couple of fundamental mistakes: the first is they assume employees are (or should be) paid according to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

> mistakes: the first is they assume employees are (or should be) paid according to how much they "individually" earned the company

From the article:

  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 an employee is essentially the value that the company expects to get out of their work. This strikes me as mostly true, most of the time
From internet:

  The marginal productivity theory of wages states that under perfect competition, workers of the same skill and efficiency will earn a wage equal to the value of their marginal product. The marginal product is the additional output from employing one more worker while keeping other factors constant. However, the theory has limitations as it assumes perfect competition, homogeneous labor, and other unrealistic conditions. In reality, competition is imperfect, labor is not perfectly mobile, and other factors like capital and management efficiency affect productivity.
The marginal argument is confusing to me.

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

#192

Post by FredPret »

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…

You're right - we can get closer and closer to an absolute measure by looking at many brains and AI's solving a problem, and converging to maximum performance given a certain amount of hardware by tweaking the algorithm or approach used.

But I think proving that maximum performance is really the ultimate level, from first principles, is a much harder task than looking at a performance graph and guesstimating the asymptote.

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

#193

Post by hipadev23 »

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…

Why can't people just suck, why does it have to turn into some anti-immigrant narrative.

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

#194

Post by zo1 »

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…

People may find that manufactured or "oh IQ is just made up and there is no measure of intelligence". But I find beauty in the way that IQ tests create and reconfigure a distribution across a multi-dimensional vector or dimensional space. It figures out what we need in the general case, and allows us to use and reason with it, without ever having to do the grunt work or arguably impossible task of finding out an actual measure of intelligence or some way to untangle the way a brain works.

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

#195

Post by liontwist »

mjburgess wrote: post #144
liontwist wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Lots of research disagrees with you indicating it’s measurable and rigid throughout most of your life.

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

#196

Post by setopt »

robocat wrote: post #191
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…

> mistakes: the first is they assume employees are (or should be) paid according to how much they "individually" earned the company From the article: 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 an employee is essentially the value that the company expects to get out of their work. This strikes me as…

> The marginal argument is confusing to me.

When economists say “marginal” they usually mean what an engineer would call “derivative”. So “marginal cost”, for example, is usually “d(cost)/d(production)” or “d(cost)/d(sales)”. Similarly, marginal productivity means “d(productivity)/d(workers)”.

Usually this pops up in ideal economics because under ideal circumstances, maximizing revenue and productivity and so on means “set the derivative of something to zero” to find the optimum point.

(Disclaimer: I’m a physicist not an economist, but I’ve taken an intro economics course. The above was my main takeaway from that…)

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

#197

Post by renewiltord »

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…

If you look at those graphs you’ll see a more telling tale. US productivity has skyrocketed but Europeans are not that productive in comparison and are stagnant. Might help with understanding what’s going on.

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

#198

Post by mjburgess »

liontwist wrote: post #195
mjburgess wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Lots of research disagrees with you indicating it’s measurable and rigid throughout most of your life.

The entire field of psychometrics is pseudoscience, as is >>90% of research with the word "heritability" in it.

The levels of pseudoscience in these areas, statistical malpractice, and the like is fairly obscene. Nothing is reproducible, and it survives only because academia is now a closed-system paper mill where peer citation is the standard of publication and tenure.

A discussion of statistical malpractice is difficult on HN, consider how easily fooled these idiots are by statistics. Researchers motivated to get into psychology are not rigorous empirical statisticians, instead they are given stats GUIs into which they put data and press play. These are the most gullible lot you'll ever find in anything called science.

The world would be better off if a delete button could be pressed on the whole activity. It's a great tragedy that it continues.

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

#199

Post by hemloc_io »

HWR_14 wrote: post #161
hemloc_io wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Lawsuit for price fixing for landlords using RealPage.

https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-sues-realp...

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

#200

Post by tptacek »

zo1 wrote: post #194
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…

People may find that manufactured or "oh IQ is just made up and there is no measure of intelligence". But I find beauty in the way that IQ tests create and reconfigure a distribution across a multi-dimensional vector or dimensional space. It figures out what we need in the general case, and allows us to use and reason with it, without ever having to do the grunt work or arguably impossible task of finding out an actu…

That's a problem with it: its high legibility masks the complex (and deceptively muddy) math underneath it. Cosma Shalizi's "Statistical Myth" essay is a good dive into this; the "general factor" underneath all the different IQ tests is more or less a statistical inevitability, reproducing even with totally random tests.
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