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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?

#231

Post by jedberg »

ksdnjweusdnkl21 wrote: post #225
jedberg wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I loved the unlimited vacation policy. I took more vacation at Netflix than anywhere else. No one was anxious about using it. 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…

Ok, but how about few months? Did anyone do that?

New parents did sometimes take a couple of months, but typically no. Some people would do 4-5 weeks in the summer. If could get your work done and set things up to run without you, it wasn't a problem.

You had unlimited vacation, but you still had to get your job done.

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

#232

Post by ip26 »

lokar wrote: post #185
jprete wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

If IQ is a good predictor of employee performance, then it does follow that employee performance would be Gaussian. It doesn’t matter that IQ was “made” to be Gaussian.

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

#233

Post by robertlagrant »

sangnoir wrote: post #201
robertlagrant wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Employers strive to pay employees the minimum they can bear, on employer's terms I don't think it's worth thinking like this. An employee's salary is floored by their value to any company, and ceilinged by their value to the company currently employing them.

The absolute numbers are hard to accurately calculate for every employee, and change all the time, so at best, the limits are fuzzy. That said, do you care to guess where in this floor-to-ceiling range the employers' ideal would fall? Does that answer conflict with my thesis?

Would you care to guess where in the range the employee's ideal would fall? The answer is missing from your thesis.

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

#234

Post by liontwist »

mjburgess wrote: post #198
liontwist wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 diff…

If it was really “pseudoscience” you would present the experiment that demonstrates it’s obviously false rather than name calling (asserting a label with a negative connotation).

The reality is not so clear and you have to contest with decade long studies in support. Maybe those studies have flaws, but it’s not a vacuum.

I have already stated I don’t believe IQ is intelligence.

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

#235

Post by ip26 »

crystal_revenge wrote: post #172
FuriouslyAdrift wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Netflix has a reputation for the highest salaries in tech. That tends to attract top talent. https://medium.com/dice-insights/netflix-ceo-explains-why-he...

My career experience has been that there's low correlation between TC and talent, especially at the high end of the talent spectrum. While I know some really smart people working at various FAANGS making great TC, nearly all of the people that are truly something special are grinding away on hard problems, relatively unknown, getting paid "fine" because they'd rather work on truly hard problems than make optimal amou…

You can apply a filter to top 10% talent and get a perfectly well supplied collection of driven, high output people who are motivated by high TC. It’s a subset, of course. And while visionary genius may not be motivated by TC, nobody said Netflix was looking to crack string theory. People don’t have to be passionate about their job to do really good work.

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

#236

Post by alexjplant »

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.

...what? It's not a claim to be falsified, it's a hyperbolic metaphor. I don't particularly like it either as it's been thrown around so much as to have lost much of its meaning (like "gaslighting", "gatekeeping", "narcissistic", etc.) but it's absolutely a thing. If you call a coworker who doesn't perform while falsely accusing you of incompetence in public Slack channels "toxic" then everybody knows exactly what you mean.

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

#237

Post by exe34 »

relaxing wrote: post #226
exe34 wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's safe to assume gp has drunk the koolaid. I spoke to somebody from the army once, and they too had the top 10% and it's difficult to imagine that every employer employs the top 10%. it's a cultural meme really, like everybody tells themselves they are good people really.

At least good behavior isn’t a zero-sum game.

not everybody can be in the top 10% best behaved.

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

#238

Post by pfooti »

torginus wrote: post #190
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…

Those two assumptions are not particularly well-supported by data or modern thought on capabilities. Even the construct of "IQ" is probably a post-hoc explanation of data rather than a predictive thing. If you want an hours-long discussion of that in the context of the book, The Bell Curve, have a look at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UBc7qBS1Ujo

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

#239

Post by fnfjfk »

relaxing wrote: post #229
ksdnjweusdnkl21 wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok, but how about few months? Did anyone do that?

Not even workers in France get a few months vacation. What are you after here?

“Unlimited” means there is no limit, so logically it means a few months should be fine. If a few months not fine, I think a reasonable request would be to define the limit and claim that instead of “unlimited”.

I work at place with about 5 work weeks off, which is a lot for the US, and there’s never any question about whether you can use your time or not because the number of days is exactly specified. I like that better than a vague “unlimited” (but not actually) policy.

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

#240

Post by scubbo »

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 very much is such a thing, and they provide an accurate definition of it in their comment.
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