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

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

#241

Post by jez » Mon, Nov 25, 2024, 9:20 PM UTC

hnuser123456 wrote: post #228

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 Performance management, as practiced in many large corporations in 2024, is an outdated technology that is in need of an update Author made a couple of fundamental mistakes: the first is they assume employees are (or should be) paid according to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 believe the graph you're referring to is here: https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/

Also: the specific choice of the year 1971 (as opposed to say "the 70s" or "the late 60s") is usually meant to call attention to the fact that in 1971 the US abandoned the gold standard for the US dollar.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nixon_shock

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

#242

Post by mjburgess » Mon, Nov 25, 2024, 9:20 PM UTC

liontwist wrote: post #234

mjburgess wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There is no experiment which proves its false. This is the problem with pseudoscience, it's "not even wrong".

Psychometrics presents summaries of data as if they are properties of reality. As-if taking a mean of survey data meant that this this mean was a property of the survey givers.

This applies only in extremely controlled experiments in physics, and even then, somewhat rarely.

All one has to do to show the entire field is pseudoscience is present a single more plausible theory than "mean of data distribution = innate property", and this is trivially done (eg., cf. mutualism about intelligence).

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

#243

Post by lbrito » Mon, Nov 25, 2024, 9:24 PM UTC

exe34 wrote: post #85

brabel wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's really difficult for me to believe that they really got 10% top performers. For one, knowing the cut-throat nature of employment there, I would expect only a minority of developers would be willing to try working there, despite the awesome rewards. Another reason I really don't trust that to be true is that I've never seen a good way to measure who is a top performer and who is not. I don't think there's one, pe…

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.

Like the Leadership Principles, or expecting everyone in your company to be a "leader". If everyone is a leader, the word is meaningless.

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

#244

Post by achierius » Mon, Nov 25, 2024, 9:28 PM UTC

nox101 wrote: post #167

PittleyDunkin wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

Can you not see how there's a massive barrier to doing that? That's exactly why there's not enough of a competitive labor market. And at that point, they're not doing their job anymore: they're doing the CEO's.

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

#245

Post by robocat » Mon, Nov 25, 2024, 9:30 PM UTC

setopt wrote: post #196

robocat wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 mean…

That's very insightful. Thank you.

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

#246

Post by yreg » Mon, Nov 25, 2024, 9:33 PM UTC

fnfjfk wrote: post #239

relaxing wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 be…

We have an actual unlimited unpaid time off policy. I have several colleagues who have taken 6+ months off (even repeatedly). Obviously I suspect that wouldn't be well-received within the "unlimited" paid leave at Netflix (but perhaps I'm wrong, I just can't imagine it).

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

#247

Post by s1artibartfast » Mon, Nov 25, 2024, 9:34 PM UTC

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…

Would you pay a farmer or doctor how much value they give to you? You die without their service.

The problem with calculating based on value provided not market rate is value provided easily sums to more than one unless you consider replacement cost.

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

#248

Post by forty » Mon, Nov 25, 2024, 9:37 PM UTC

betaby wrote: post #230

forty wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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").

Interesting. Is that a law or a typical contract term?

It's labour law. If you want to read some french law ^^ https://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/codes/id/LEGISCTA000006198540

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

#249

Post by coredog64 » Mon, Nov 25, 2024, 9:38 PM UTC

whatever1 wrote: post #170

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…

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

There’s a 6 month window between layoffs and PERM filings (green card). Employers can still submit PERM filings, but AIUI, doing so risks audits.

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

#250

Post by ianbicking » Mon, Nov 25, 2024, 9:39 PM UTC

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…

I'm not saying the ranking is necessarily wrong, but that turning the ranking into a distribution is constructed. And it MIGHT be a correct construction, but I am less confident that is true.

The distribution implies something like "someone at 50% is not that different than someone at 55%" but "someone at 90% is very different from 95%". That is: the x axis implies there's some unit of intelligence, and the actual intelligence of people in the middle is roughly similar despite ranking differences. That distribution also implies that when you get to the extremities the ranking reflects greater differences in intelligence.