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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?

#331

Post by wavemode »

crazygringo wrote: post #323
wavemode wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

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

Here's just one article - it references numerous studies and meta-studies, broadly making the case that Pareto distributions tend to fit real-world data better than Gaussian (including employee performance, if you observe the section titled "Managing People"): https://hbr.org/2022/01/we-need-to-let-go-of-the-bell-curve

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

#332

Post by fargle »

bornfreddy wrote: post #112
seiferteric wrote: post #57

A lot of focus on employee performance, but relatively little on management performance. I always wonder how a once great company can slowly decline into irrelevance. Take yahoo for example, it could only be due to management failure over several decades right? How can companies optimize for management performance?

Firing 10% each year would be a great start in many companies. ;)

firing the right 10% each year would be great, but that's the problem.

can you expect the management correctly identify the right people to fire, especially when they are themselves heavily over-represented in that class?

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

#333

Post by seiferteric »

fargle wrote: post #332
bornfreddy wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Firing 10% each year would be a great start in many companies. ;)

firing the right 10% each year would be great, but that's the problem. can you expect the management correctly identify the right people to fire, especially when they are themselves heavily over-represented in that class?

Maybe employees get a vote on who to fire.

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

#334

Post by fargle »

seiferteric wrote: post #333
fargle wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

firing the right 10% each year would be great, but that's the problem. can you expect the management correctly identify the right people to fire, especially when they are themselves heavily over-represented in that class?

Maybe employees get a vote on who to fire.

well, that's simply not how any business works, even in the most extreme naively theoretical socialistic case. why would a company do that? - employees don't (generally) own the company.

even for some reason they were forced to, in practice, a cadre of employees (most likely the ones you'd want to fire in the first place), would instantly form some new ad-hoc political layer to exercise political power and control the organization, voting, etc.

so you just end up with a layer of useless management and a independent layer of useless politicians, neither of which are willing to fire themselves.

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

#335

Post by mdnahas »

I’m an economist who has looked into something like this. This paper is about intra-company performance. I’ve look at incomes of the whole population. There, you find two distribution. Wages seem to follow a log-normal distribution, while income from investments follows a heavy-tailed distribution, like a Pareto.

Wages tend to be smaller than asset income. Top sports players and musicians work for wages and become billionaires. Startup founders, who own assets, become trillionaires.

Obviously, there are differences. Wages are not productivity. (But the article didn’t say how productivity was measured.). Also, a company can choose who joins and leaves it. So one company’s wage distribution doesn’t have to follow the distribution of the wider economy.

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

#336

Post by mdnahas »

estebarb wrote: post #211

Some years ago I started doing graphs of code contributions across the year (yeah, wrong thing to measure, I know). A funny thing is that people considered "high performers" could be made the worse performers depending on how you cut the data. Basically, performance had a wave behavior, and nobody was at 100% all the time. That is a good argument for diverse hiring: people will have bad days/seasons, fact of life. If…

I did that once and one contributor had a huge negative value. His team had reimplemented a feature and his major contribution was deleting the old version.

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

#337

Post by withinboredom »

munk-a wrote: post #186
withinboredom wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of the world is ruled by luck. Where you are born, who your parents, how rich they are, who you know, whether or not someone “better” than you applies for the same position, etc. etc. Ignoring luck or trying to control for it would be a mistake.

Ignoring luck is a requirement - conditions born from luck may be worth consideration but past luck is not a predictor of future luck. I'd clarify - trying to ignore someone's education because it's a result of their citizenship or the wealth of their family is going to be endlessly frustrating... but if your metrics can't exclude luck and happenstance during the execution of the task then they're not worth much of a…

You can literally get a 1:1 model of capitalism by modeling luck alone. To ignore it is to pretend that you have some kind of control of luck.

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

#338

Post by xyzzy4747 »

PittleyDunkin wrote: post #322
xyzzy4747 wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What do you mean exactly? Literally every job that exists in the private sector is created by a company, and companies are created by shareholders.

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

#339

Post by photon_lines »

deepnet wrote: post #108
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…

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 “

I disagree. The best employees are the employees who don't need to be managed. They figure what out what needs to be done and walk into the business (from day one to the last day they are there) thinking like owners. Google in its very early days operated without managers. Some of the most successful companies / start-ups delivered what they delivered not due to management, but due to having a few highly-motivated individuals who were dead set in delivering something outstanding to the world. They didn't need to be micro-managed into doing what they did - they figured out what needed to be done and figured out how to get there.

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

#340

Post by liontwist »

mjburgess wrote: post #329
liontwist wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 di…

If you're willing to agree "IQ" is in the same realm "Athleticism" in terms of realism and heritability, then I have nothing more to say. There would be no question studying IQ is incredibly valuable.

Sure, maybe there is no part of the human which is the IQ, and it's a merely a summary of other factors being expressed. I don't think IQ researchers ever claimed otherwise.

Are you familiar with "entropy"? Isn't that a statistical summary of a configuration of atoms? Wow! Emergent properties, with no physical existence are a big part of science.

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