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Hey, wait – is employee performance Gaussian distributed?

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

#281

Post by pantalaimon »

johnnyanmac wrote: post #261
edanm wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

There isn’t a way to fix it, a new hire is always an unknown factor by definition. And if you aren’t FAANG, people usually aren’t lining up at your door to work for you, so you have to make do with what you get.

Pair that with the fact that the new hire won’t reach full productivity until at least 6 months in, it’s always going to be messy.

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

#282

Post by Spooky23 »

thrwaway1985882 wrote: post #171
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…

This is a great point. Toxicity is entirely orthogonal to performance. And you rarely have to worry about toxic low performers: if you're unlucky enough to hire them, they don't stay around for long. But toxic top performers are IME one of the biggest challenges a manager will have to deal with. You have to root them out the moment they land in an organization because given enough they'll push out the non-toxic top p…

For leaders, Kurt von Hammerstein-Equord‘s advice reigns supreme. The diligent idiot is always the biggest threat, and the stupid and lazy are awesome as long as they stay in their lane.

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

#283

Post by johnnyanmac »

pantalaimon wrote: post #281
johnnyanmac wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

There isn’t a way to fix it, a new hire is always an unknown factor by definition. And if you aren’t FAANG, people usually aren’t lining up at your door to work for you, so you have to make do with what you get. Pair that with the fact that the new hire won’t reach full productivity until at least 6 months in, it’s always going to be messy.

>a new hire is always an unknown factor by definition.

sure, that's why the entire hiring factor is an industry comprised of HR, recruiters, and hiring managers. you're supposed to minimize the odds of a bad hire. Similar to any other business that is an unknown factor until you do research.

Life's all about dealing with known and unknown unknowns.

>And if you aren’t FAANG, people usually aren’t lining up at your door to work for you, so you have to make do with what you get.

Not in this current economy. That's part of the frustration with the current market. Everyone is lining up, few are getting hired, but hey it's okay unemployment is low and the economy is great!

>Pair that with the fact that the new hire won’t reach full productivity until at least 6 months in

well that's also mitigatable. Make your process public and let candidates study to your tools and process. But that will never happen because it's more important to hide your process from competitors than get qualified candidates to ramp up quicker.

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

#284

Post by elzbardico »

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

But this is not punishing the company. If anything it is helping the company to avoid having all those H1B workers looking for another job. "Oh, surely, we'd love to sponsor your green card, but you see? we can't! This senator that we incidentaly gave millions for his campaign got this idea out of his mind, alone, that we now can't sponsor your green card, and yes, it is horrible to work here after the layoffs, but looks like you're stuck with us."

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

#285

Post by Spooky23 »

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.

You’re naive. God bless you for not encountering one of these people.

People like this are masters at working the system and will make everyone around them miserable. They crave attention and love to wield power.

The most toxic person I can think of spent most of his career broadly filing complaints for various forms of discrimination, which insulated him from accountability because any attempt to fire him would be seen as retaliation. His parting shot was to call the FBI and accuse a coworker of trading illicit porn on his work computer.

Nasty, evil people exist.

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

#286

Post by groby_b »

nextn wrote: post #259
groby_b wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It would be a monumental achievement if computer science ever advances to the point where we have a mathematical way of determining the minimum absolute intelligence required to solve a given problem. While that would be nice, it's likely a pipe dream :( There's a good chance "intelligence" is really a multi-dimensional thing influenced by a lot of different factors. We like pretending it's one-dimensional so we ca…

What is a flaw of the IQ test?

There is no "the IQ test". The most prominent ones are Stanford-Binet and Wechsler.

That, I think is the first problem. There isn't a single agreement what IQ is or how to measure it. There isn't a single one for good reasons, because they all measure slightly different things. But that means that fundamentally any single IQ scale is likely flawed. (Wechsler acknowledges this. SB sorta does as well, but hides it well)

But if we're looking for a second at Stanford Binet :

It's hard to administer. Scoring requires subjective judgment. It's sexist. It uses language and situations that don't apply to current times. It's highly verbal. The normative sample is questionable (though SB-V has gotten better)

And because I've had this discussion before: I'm not saying IQ tests are completely meaningless. Yes, there's some signal there. But it's so deeply flawed signal that building rigorous science on top of it is just hard to impossible.

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

#287

Post by jedberg »

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…

Like most policies at Netflix, or for that matter most workplaces anywhere, judgement is required.

The policy is unlimited. You are welcome to take a year of vacation a week after you start. However, there are other factors, such as remaining employed. You most likely won't be meeting your job duties if you're on vacation for a year.

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

#288

Post by Spooky23 »

Aurornis wrote: post #188
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…

> But for now, I definitely need my low performers. Firing people if you can't get backfill is illogical, obviously. Once a company institutes a hiring freeze, low performers get locked in until forced layoffs. You'll see some people stop working and start job searching because they know that any contribution they make at all is better for their manager than having them fired. However, deliberately keeping low perfor…

The evil path for a director is to acquire a nonessential group and make it the land of misfit toys.

Bank them away from everyone else, and nuke them from orbit when necessary.

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

#289

Post by bdangubic »

alsetmusic wrote: post #273
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. 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…

this exactly! everyone should find the bare minimum which does not get you fired and just do that - nothing more. salaried employees just don’t grasp the simple truth that putting in more than bare-minimum-required-to-keep-the-job is absolute waste which only benefits the employer. if I have no equity or vested interest in company’s success - this is the way!

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

#290

Post by groby_b »

anktor wrote: post #271
groby_b wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

There are a number of decent books.

"Become an Effective Software Engineering Manager", "The Manager's Path", "Becoming a Technical Leader", "An Elegant Puzzle", "Resilient Management".

But your best bet is either finding an experienced manager who's willing to coach you, or working with a management coach.

(There's a number of folks blogging as well. Gergely Orosz, Laura Hogan, Camille Fournier,...)

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