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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?

#271

Post by anktor »

groby_b wrote: post #134
deepnet wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My takeaway ( and an indication of who actually needs a performance review [ e.g. the manager ]) “ It’s my opinion that the biggest factor in an employee's performance – perhaps bigger than the employee’s abilities and level of effort – is whether their manager set them up for success “

It's not so much that managers need a performance review per se, but they need training and useful feedback. If you've ever worked in tech management, your experience likely was "IDK, you're senior, you vaguely have an idea what we should do, here, go manage a few folks". No training, or minimal training. Often with an expectation that of course you can still be a strong technical contributor, because how much time c…

As someone doing this transition, I would love some references that help me... Train myself I guess? Other than by doing and analyzing myself, which is my current situation

I have realized I can give so many tips and reference so many great content online to learn math, programming, engineering... But find myself missing anything about managing

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

#272

Post by johnnyanmac »

bluGill wrote: post #135
ec109685 wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Employers want to pay the minimum, clearly, but until a person’s salary exceeds the value they bring to a firm, there will be other firms willing to pay more and attract that talent. So provides some upward pressure on wages, which the author addresses: > 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…

> but until a person’s salary exceeds the value they bring to a firm, there will be other firms willing to pay more and attract that talent This is false. Supply and demand is a factor. I could clean the toilets at the office, if janitors were in short supply my boss might setup a rotation schedule - nobody wants to but it must be done and so he would pay me. However because janitors are cheaper than me he doesn't. T…

I don't see the contradiction. Janitorial duties are at the very worst easy to train any person off the street for. As long as people need any sort of minimum wage to survive you can find a janitor.

But that also means that, because minimum wage, your salary will almost never exceed the value brought to that business. Outside of some super crazy regulations of cleanliness.

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

#273

Post by alsetmusic »

nilkn wrote: post #159
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 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.

After killing myself at a FAANG because it was what was expected (to my mental health detriment), I have exactly this attitude since. At the end of the day, I'm done. I'm gone. I don't care. Even while I'm there, I'm only doing the amount outlined in the job and nothing extra. When I have a task to complete, I do my best to do it well. But I also don't care and don't sweat making sure it's perfect.

This has worked out great. I think I do a good enough job to be viewed as pretty good at what I do. That's good enough for me. I don't want advancement. I don't want more responsibility. Just give me a cost-of-living bump every year and we're good.

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

#274

Post by johnnyanmac »

PittleyDunkin wrote: post #174
nox101 wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

> If you think you're not getting paid enough you should quit and start your own company. I'd rather eat a bullet, thanks. I have dignity and I'd like to keep it. > The fact that google/apple/amazon make 5-10x per employee is not proof that you're underpaid. That's exactly what it means. > The chef at French Laundry makes $$$$$$$, does that mean the apple farmer who supplied the apples for $ is underpaid? The chef is…

>I have dignity and I'd like to keep it.

it's not about dignity, it's about history. That's why those FAANGs offered crazy salaries before tapering off some 5 years ago.

The last thing they wanted was for the true 10x'ers to become tomorrow's competition, or for others to work for such 10x'ers. Because if such an engineer could make a 10m/yr business vs being hired for 100k, many would take that business opportunity.

>Shareholders contribute nothing to society.

they contribute money, and that's all that matters. quality, long term profitability, and worker dignity be damned.

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

#275

Post by johnnyanmac »

achierius wrote: post #244
nox101 wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>Can you not see how there's a massive barrier to doing that

yeah, business is hard. FAANG paying a very cushy salary is relatively easier. The ambitious would still consider such a choice tho, and those are the ones they want to keep in their own company instead of as a future competitor. They literally paid off a competitive labor market.

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

#276

Post by Glyptodon »

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…

It does seem like you should assume the accuracy of the result decreases as you get away from the norm of an IQ test, though I have no idea if it's been validated. But particularly if there are mistakes on the test questions or any kinds of ambiguity in any of the questions, it seems like you'd expect that.

Like if you have two different IQ tests and someone takes one, and gets 100, if 100 is normed to the 50th percentile, maybe you have 95% confidence that on the next test they're also getting 100 +/- 2.5. But if they get 140, that's normed to like 99th percentile, maybe your 95% confidence interval for the next test is 140 +/- 12.5. (I really don't know, I just suspect that the higher the percentile someone gets, the less confidence you'd have and mostly know stats from physical and bio science labs, not from IQ or human evaluation contexts.)

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

#277

Post by efitz »

JoshTriplett wrote: post #263
Aurornis wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Severance packages always requires signing a “I give up my right to sue you” document. It is 100% about lawsuit reduction and 0% about being gentle with employees.

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

#278

Post by Majromax »

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.

Not necessarily. A "good predictor" could still result in non-Gaussian performance for at least two reasons:

1. The prediction could be on a relative rather than quantitative basis. If IQ(A) > IQ(B) always implies Perf(A) > Perf(B), then the absolute distributions for each could still be arbitrary.

2. A "good predictor" in the social sciences doesn't always mean that it explains a large part of the variance. If IQ quantitative correlates with observed performance on some scale, but it explains only 25% of the variance, then the distributions could still be quite different. Furthermore, if you're making this kind of quantitative comparison you must also have quantitative performance measurement, whereupon its probability density function should be much easier to directly estimate.

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

#279

Post by seizethecheese »

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…

I think your comment about an easy test having everyone in the “knows a lot” category hints that the reverse (a hard test) would be Pareto distributed.

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

#280

Post by throwgaussian »

nilkn wrote: post #159
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 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…

> they take too long to reply to emails or messages, or their work needs extra review and checks and balances, or they are only capable of delivering on a relatively small set of fairly simple tasks, or they just want to work on the same part of the same product forever and can’t emotionally handle change

As someone on the ASD spectrum, who has struggled in the workplace, I resemble that remark! I found my coding job to be ok before the app was converted to be web-based, then found it to be death by a 1000 distractions as I became more senior and found the web project to be too messy, too many checkins of bad code by the overseas team, team too big, etc. Anyone have tips to help someone like me?

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