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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?

#211

Post by estebarb »

Some years ago I started doing graphs of code contributions across the year (yeah, wrong thing to measure, I know). A funny thing is that people considered "high performers" could be made the worse performers depending on how you cut the data. Basically, performance had a wave behavior, and nobody was at 100% all the time.

That is a good argument for diverse hiring: people will have bad days/seasons, fact of life. If the team is diverse is less probable that those bad days will correlate between different employees.

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

#212

Post by thesz »

> IQ is Gaussian. The Big Five Personality Trait known as Conscientiousness is likewise Gaussian. For what it’s worth, human height is also Gaussian...

Height cannot be negative, thus, it is not Gaussian. IQ cannot be negative too. Great many things that most people think are Gaussians, are not.

One of such distributions that describe one-sided values, log-normal distribution (logarithms of values are distributed normally) has interesting property that for some d values x=mean+d are more probable than values x=mean-d (heavy tail). Also, sum of log-normal-distributed values does not converge to Gaussian distribution.

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

#214

Post by hinkley »

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…

> I think that any of these simplified distributions are likely not generalizable across companies and industries

It’s going to be multivariate statistics with dependent variables. The quality of non developers at company affects the quality of developers they can retain, and the quality of the developers you have affects the quality of developers you can recruit and improve. Almost all the people I’d want to work with again left my last employer before I did.

You can take on more and more work yourself but it causes everyone around you to disengage. At some point you have to realize it’s more fruitful, emotionally and mathematically, to make coworkers produce one more unit of forward progress a month than to do it to yourself. Because it’s 2% for the team one way and 5-10% the other.

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

#215

Post by codeduck »

jahewson wrote: post #189
nilkn wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> There’s no such thing

This is your opinion. I have worked with and managed 'toxic' employees. They are very much a thing.

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

#216

Post by smj-edison »

jppope wrote: post #101
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…

Correct. IQ isn't an effective measurement of intelligence as is typically stated. It is (at best) a measurement of learning disabilities.

I think IQ is useful in aggregate (for example, a finding that exposure to local toxins reduces a cities' performance on IQ by 10 points), but not useful an an individual level (e.g. you have an IQ of 130, so we can say with certainty you will earn $30,000 more per year). It's similar with MRI scans of ADHD: they find brain differences at a large scale, but you can't use a MRI to diagnose ADHD.

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

#217

Post by _DeadFred_ »

Retric wrote: post #179
nilkn wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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. Another is poor fit between the employee and the job. One the lowest performers in a role can sometime be a great in another because they do/don’t care about clean code, long hours, spelling / grammar issues, minor aesthetic issues, minor bugs, spe…

Or the fit between employee and manager. I've come into many teams where the employee on a PIP went to being one of my best performers while those I was given the ravest reviews for were just mediocre under me. Or even just cultural. I had to change how I managed/my expectations as I moved positions around the country or when offshore teams were brought on.

I agree with your shocking premise that people are not machines and expand it to include that they are also not numbers in a spreadsheet or HR system.

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

#219

Post by hinkley »

thesz wrote: post #212

> IQ is Gaussian. The Big Five Personality Trait known as Conscientiousness is likewise Gaussian. For what it’s worth, human height is also Gaussian... Height cannot be negative, thus, it is not Gaussian. IQ cannot be negative too. Great many things that most people think are Gaussians, are not. One of such distributions that describe one-sided values, log-normal distribution (logarithms of values are distributed nor…

> IQ cannot be negative

Have you been keeping up with current events?

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

#220

Post by mjburgess »

EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK wrote: post #210
mjburgess wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're not independent.

Yeah, if one answers question A correctly, they is more likely to answer question B correctly, right?

Indeed. The whole premise of the activity is that they are highly correlated.

The imposition of a normal distribution is done ad-hoc at the population level. All it says is that if scores were normally distributed, then "people would be so-and-so comparable".

Almost all assumptions of this method are false.

Any time anyone mentions the central limit theorem in applied stats is a warning sign for pseudoscience. If reality existed at the end of the CLT, it would be in heat death.

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