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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?

#301

Post by m3kw9 »

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…

Lazy employees are most times unmotivated for what ever reasons. Either it’s the work they do to just very hard to motivate such people. Slow employees maybe too risk adverse so they go slowly, or they don’t know to seek out better ways to do things.

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

#302

Post by jlawson »

KK7NIL wrote: post #252
Bootvis wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It does. A lognormal distribution would model that better which gives a nice right tail so maybe it is a useful toy model.

A long right tail Gaussian fits the Elo ratings of active chess players very well, as I discussed in adjacent comments here.

Isn't that just because there is a practical limit to how bad at chess someone can be? That is to say, making utterly random moves.

But there is no limit to how good they can be.

So of course the right tail is longer; the left tail is cut off!

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

#303

Post by doctorpangloss »

abeppu wrote: post #150
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 Performance management, as practiced in many large corporations in 2024, is an outdated technology that is in need of an update Author made a couple of fundamental mistakes: the first is they assume employees are (or should be) paid according to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…

It's also just embarrassing that this is supposed to be a data science blog about employee performance and the only non-simulated data directly presented or discussed is the US wage distribution, where the author has just cavalierly marked the x-axis as "Performance". There's all this spew, and the author makes claims about what good data scientists do ... and there's no data in this discussion that's directly releva…

This topic is written about better elsewhere.

Here's an opinion piece in the Harvard Business Review in 2022: https://hbr.org/2022/01/we-need-to-let-go-of-the-bell-curve

Here's another article on the same topic from 2014: https://www.forbes.com/sites/joshbersin/2014/02/19/the-myth-...

Here's more press on the same topic from 2012: https://www.npr.org/2012/05/03/151860154/put-away-the-bell-c...

From a data science point of view, if you want to compare the fitness of different distributions to data, go ahead and do some fitness tests, like AIC or BIC, to compare distributions. Ordinary Gaussian outperforms skew-normal and log-normal in many settings where the physics of the measurements would suggest otherwise.

However, it matters what you are measuring.

Here's a summary quote that explains what this Pareto versus Gaussian stuff is talking about:

> "We found that a small minority of superstar performers contribute a disproportionate amount of the output."

That is very different than saying that employee performance is Pareto instead of Gaussian distributed. "Output" and "employee performance" measures two different things. If there is any big picture flaw to all of this: it is quintessentially Individual Contributor to conflate output with employee performance.

Another POV is that people who get fired from IC jobs understandably lament a lot of the details of their circumstances. One detail that comes up is that other people take credit for their work, which should illuminate how output and employee performance measure different things in a way that interacts in the opposite of what the article is advocating for.

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

#304

Post by KK7NIL »

doctorpangloss wrote: post #297
KK7NIL wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lichess has public population data (they use a modified version of Glicko-2 which is basically an updated version of Elo's system): https://lichess.org/stat/rating/distribution/blitz It's basically a Gaussian with a very long right tail. Big caveat here is that these are the ratings of weekly active players. If we instead include casual players, I suspect we'd have something resembling a pareto distribution.

The big caveat is that it's trivial to measure the AIC, BIC and other quality of fit measurements for a distribution. If you think it's so and so distribution, go for it. In my experience in this specific case of chess rankings and in the broader case of test scores, skew-normal and log-normal have worse fits than plain Guassian. I have no idea why you would believe increasing the population would make this Gaussian…

I was conjecturing that the distribution would be closer to Pareto for everyone (including people who've never learned how to play chess), hence why I said that "active players" is a big caveat.

> increasing populations make things look more Gaussian - in all natural circumstances.

This is just not the case, there's plenty of "natural circumstances" where populations have non-Gaussian distributions.

Perhaps you meant a specific type of population, like chess ratings? I'd be interested in seeing what you find there, but all I've found shows significantly distorted tails (not to mention a skew from 1500).

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

#305

Post by throwaway2037 »

_DeadFred_ wrote: post #217
Retric wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Another is poor fit between the employee and the job. One the lowest performers in a role can sometime be a great in another because they do/don’t care about clean code, long hours, spelling / grammar issues, minor aesthetic issues, minor bugs, spe…

Or the fit between employee and manager. I've come into many teams where the employee on a PIP went to being one of my best performers while those I was given the ravest reviews for were just mediocre under me. Or even just cultural. I had to change how I managed/my expectations as I moved positions around the country or when offshore teams were brought on. I agree with your shocking premise that people are not machi…

    > I had to change how I managed/my expectations ... when offshore teams were brought on.
Did you mean to say "lowered my expectations"?

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

#306

Post by sgerenser »

hemloc_io wrote: post #121
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…

When I first heard of the Work Number, I thought there's no way they stay in business given the Real Page suit.

Note that with the Work Number, you can at least freeze your file, much like a credit report. Employers will still submit information, but potential employers (or lenders, or anyone else) will not be able to access the report.

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

#307

Post by losthalo »

X + Y + [XY] = 8

X = the individual's contribution

Y = the contribution of the system they work within

[XY] = the interaction of the individual with the system

8 represents some measure of productivity, e.g., rate of errors, millions of dollars in profit, whatever you're measuring

The person who can solve for X is competent to rate people on their performance.

What to do instead of (destructively) rating people?

Build better systems for doing the work, make their work easier, give them psychological safety and job security so they can relax and enjoy their work and share better methods with each other.

(All paraphrased from W. Edwards Deming.)

Competition within organizations is for amateurs.

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

#308

Post by wavemode »

crazygringo wrote: post #253
wavemode wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So a Gaussian distribution is a far more reasonable assumption than a slice of the Pareto distribution It's not an assumption. See the evidence referenced in the footnotes.

Incorrect. It is absolutely an assumption. The "evidence" in the footnotes is about national salary data. Not the distribution for any individual position at a company. And it is entirely possible (and probable) that performance at each position is distributed as a Gaussian, and all those Gaussians add up to a Pareto at a population level. But you simply cannot take national-level data and assume it applies at the mi…

> And it is entirely possible (and probable) that performance at each position is distributed as a Gaussian

Find me any research agreeing with this statement

(spoiler - you won't, because researchers have broadly reached consensus to the opposite)

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

#309

Post by bluGill »

johnnyanmac wrote: post #272
bluGill wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Janitor is a messy and low prestige job. As such some will choose a lower paying job if they get the option and the pay isn't too much worse

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

#310

Post by SideQuark »

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…

That “infamous graph” is mostly pop nonsense. Simply google productivity graph versus income debunk economists.

The problem is bad Econ like that latch onto certain untrained brains like quack cures to an antivaxxer, because they reinforce unfounded beliefs (beliefs formed by eating too much of stuff like this).

The actual items under consideration are far less spectacular or supporting the dearth of conspiracies, so the truth doesn’t spread as fast. It’s not so shiny or conspiracy reinforcing.

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