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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?

#321

Post by relaxing »

intelVISA wrote: post #315
yreg wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

I quite like the unlimited unpaid policy, is there a reason it's rare? I'm guessing the implication that if you can take 6months off you weren't really necessary?

Yeah companies generally hire because they need you there working.

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

#322

Post by PittleyDunkin »

xyzzy4747 wrote: post #295
PittleyDunkin wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

The original shareholders created the company. Without them there wouldn't be jobs. The newer shareholders provided liquidity to the original shareholders. Their benefit to society was helping to incentivize the people who created the company (and all the jobs) by making them rich.

> The original shareholders created the company. Without them there wouldn't be jobs.

For a nation with so many smart people we sure pretend to be dumb.

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

#323

Post by crazygringo »

wavemode wrote: post #308
crazygringo wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

OK, can you point us to that consensus please? Anything published?

I would have thought that if there were literature on that consensus, the author would have cited it. But they didn't. And the entire tone of their article is speculative.

Gaussians are generally considered the default assumption for a process with an error term with unrestricted movement in both directions, until shown otherwise.

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

#324

Post by aleph_minus_one »

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…

> 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.

Often such people have good arguments, they are just vocal about them and not the "docile" kind of people. For example the great engineer who is willing to fight to keep the code well-architected and clean.

Of course managers hate this kind of "non-docile" employee, and thus invent terms like "toxic" to be capable of bullying (and perhaps having a "socially accepted" reason for firing) them.

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

#325

Post by diggan »

nkrisc wrote: post #102
diggan wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Hopefully you don’t get assigned to fixing bugs, because then you may not earn any money.

Unless you fix bugs in the payment systems, then you'll probably earn more than anyone.

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

#326

Post by yreg »

intelVISA wrote: post #315
yreg wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

I quite like the unlimited unpaid policy, is there a reason it's rare? I'm guessing the implication that if you can take 6months off you weren't really necessary?

>I'm guessing the implication that if you can take 6months off you weren't really necessary?

No one is strictly necessary. You can bring value to the company and it still doesn't mean that the company would go bankrupt if you left for half a year.

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

#327

Post by yreg »

jedberg wrote: post #287
fnfjfk wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“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.

So you are expected to see to your job duties while on vacation?

What you describe sounds a bit like "if you manage to do your work faster, you can take the remaining time off", correct?

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

#328

Post by pajko »

The problem is that the performance cannot be measured really, do there's nothing to talk about. KPIs like LOC/month or resolved tickets/month does not tell anything. Nor does completed projects/year, nor does the project's size. Name a single thing which does not depend on external stuff. Have fun with an idiotic client, or an idiotic management. If you want to remove the people who do not work, then do that. If you do not know who they are, fire your managers. Or better, fire yourself too, as it seems like you dont' know what you are doing. If you want to lower costs, fire managers and sales people first.

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

#329

Post by mjburgess »

liontwist wrote: post #258
mjburgess wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 entir…

You’re softening your position, you agree it exists and is testable, you just disagree with the interpretation of those results. > is present a single more plausible theory A minority support for a workable theory is quite a bit different state of affairs than “false science” which the word implies. It’s a form of name calling. > There is no experiment which proves it’s false. This is the problem with pseudoscience,…

There is a "positive manifold" of results across test we call "intelligence tests", this is a property of the test data. What "IQ" does is take the mean of this and call it a property -- no such property exists.

Consider athleticism: across all sporting activites there's a positive correlation of ability. Call it "athleticism". But people do not have "athleticism". If you break there leg some of these correlations disappear, and some survive. Atheticism is a result of a very large number of properties of people, which arises out of highly complex interactions.

Heritability measures the correlation of traits with genes. We have ~20k genes, and we share 90% with mice, almost no genes code for traits. The vast majority of trait-gene correlations are caused by geographical (and cultural) mating patterns. So scottish accents are nearly 100% heritable, since nearly all people with one share some genes; and nearly all people without one do not have at least some of these genes. So much for "heritability" -- the use of this statistic, outside of extremely narrow biological experiments where corrlation is the result of causing genes to corrlete (by design) -- is pseudoscience.

And so 1) there is no trait "intelligence"; and 2) all claims to trait-intelligence-gene correlation are confounded by massive non-genetic factors beyond causal control.

And so: psychometrics is pseudoscience. The vast majority of its popular results are by frauds, charlatans and just plain idiots. I have no pleasant words for them: I call them by their name. Fraud is rampent, and even if it weren't, given causal-physiological semantics to factor correlations is pseudoscience.

It wasnt very hard to see, many of the citations in these famous works of IQ research were conducted under extreme causal confounders (eg., black people in aprethid south africa, people selected for the IQ test by an IQ test, etc.).

There isnt any kind of scientific research which can today establish "IQ" as a property of people --- we have no experiments which can control for known, massive, confounders. We cannot breed generations of people with deterministic genetic variation, deterministic childhoods, (etc. etc.). This kind of science is as impossible today as microbiology was to the greeks.

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

#330

Post by jedberg »

yreg wrote: post #327
jedberg wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

So you are expected to see to your job duties while on vacation? What you describe sounds a bit like "if you manage to do your work faster, you can take the remaining time off", correct?

Not really sure how you got that from what I wrote.

You're expected to do your job to remain employed. You are welcome to take as much paid time off as you want, in which you would ignore your job.

Assuming you did your job well, this won't be a problem. You either set things up to run on their own in the short term, or you've sufficiently cross trained someone else who isn't on vacation to cover for you.

What I'm saying is that if you try to take a year of paid vacation a week after you start the job, it's unlikely that you've set up either of those things before you go.

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