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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?

#261

Post by johnnyanmac »

edanm wrote: post #222
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'll add a perverse incentive too that I've talked about elsewhere – hiring is a goddamn mess right now. Not to take away from any of your points... But this statement has been made every year for as long as I've been in the industry (about twenty years). I suspect it's been made much before that too.

I guess it's messy but it's not worth the cost to fix, in that case.

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

#262

Post by HDThoreaun »

ianbicking wrote: post #250
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…

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 in…

The distribution implies that a score of 100 means you did better than half the population, and that a score of 130 means you did 2 standard deviations better than the population ie. better than 95% of other people. We have no objective measure of IQ so we use relative rankings. If you used a uniform distribution for iq everyone currently above 145 would have 99 out of 100 IQ. Normal distribution is useful when you want to differentiate points in the tails

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

#263

Post by JoshTriplett »

Aurornis wrote: post #182
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…

> 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 perform…

I think it's exceptionally unlikely that companies are doing layoffs instead of firing for the benefit of employees. You're holding up reasons like severance and saving face.

From everything I've seen, the much more common reason is that firing someone typically entails a much longer paper trail for CYA reasons. Batching them up and including them in the next round of layoffs is easier and safer.

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

#264

Post by [deleted] »

Aurornis wrote: post #182
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…

> 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 perform…

[deleted]

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

#266

Post by johnnyanmac »

Aurornis wrote: post #182
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…

> 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 perform…

>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".

Given that we long since decoupled terminations for being based on performance, I'd rather employers just be honest.

But they won't do that because they don't want any risk of lawsuits. Even if they are truly low performing, firing a pregnant woman or someone who happens to be an outlier race in the company is just too easy a setup for scrutiny. I've seen plenty of those kinds of people mixed up in these layoffs as well.

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

#267

Post by lokar »

ip26 wrote: post #232
lokar wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Are you assuming that employee performance is Gaussian?

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

#268

Post by johnnyanmac »

HeyLaughingBoy wrote: post #177
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…

It's entirely possible to need to lay off people for one type of work while being unable to staff up for a different skillset. I would expect software developers, of all people, to understand that we're not commodities.

I'd also expect that Software Engineers can ramp up surprisingly fast in different skillsets as needed. But that requires time to train (independently or otherwise), and no one wants to do that anymore.

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

#269

Post by johnnyanmac »

hipadev23 wrote: post #193
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…

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

>Why can't people just suck

Because most people after a few years of experience do not simply "suck" in a vacuum. If you need to get rid of 2-3 people it might be a "suck problem". if you need to get rid of 200-300 people it's a more systematic issue or incentive being driving such mass actions.

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

#270

Post by konschubert »

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…

> How much revenue do you think a janitor or café staffer generates? Close to zero.

This completely depends on how you do your internal revenue accounting.

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