One reason I'd never work for a company with a 'bottom 10% gets PIP'd' mentality is that it directly conflicts with my goal of self development. Of course I want to be on a great team where everyone performs better than I do. That's how I hone my craft! It just seems really wasteful to have to cull the bottom 10% of every team, even if that team is performing well. I wish there was a list of companies that subscribed to that mentality, so I could avoid them.
Hey, wait – is employee performance Gaussian distributed?
41–50 of 341 posts
Re: Hey, wait – is employee performance Gaussian distributed?
#42This is a well constructed empty argument because it glosses over the central concern, ‘employee performance’. Without defining that we have no idea what the graph represents.
For analyses like this it just doesn't matter. Pick a metric and measure it over your workforce. Across the universe of salient metrics of interest you won't see a gaussian across your workforce. In a previous job I modelled this and concluded that due to measurement error and year-over-yead enrichment, Welchian rank-and-yank results in firing people at random.
Stack ranking will tell you when something isn't working, but the solution isn't always to fire, but rather use that data to fix things in a more general solution.
I found that team composition and role assignment matters a lot, at least if you hire people who are at least above a certain bar. Match a brilliant non-assertive coder with someone who is outgoing and good at getting along and at least decent coder, and the results from the two outperform generally either of them individually.
You can bring out the best of your employees or you can set them up against each other. This either brings everyone up or brings everyone down.
Re: Hey, wait – is employee performance Gaussian distributed?
#43> For what it’s worth, human height is also Gaussian, and that’s correlated with workplace success.
Height is generally not considered to be Gaussian and this is exactly the kind of statistics mistake the author seems to be accusing employers of. Adult height is somewhere between Gaussian and bimodal.
Re: Hey, wait – is employee performance Gaussian distributed?
#44In the work rules book about google, Bock claims (apparently using a lot of real data from google) that employee performance follows a power law distribution.
Re: Hey, wait – is employee performance Gaussian distributed?
#45> For what it’s worth, human height is also Gaussian, and that’s correlated with workplace success. Height is generally not considered to be Gaussian and this is exactly the kind of statistics mistake the author seems to be accusing employers of. Adult height is somewhere between Gaussian and bimodal.
Fair enough.
Perhaps better stated as "adult human height is approximately Gaussian for a given biological sex", with an asterisk that environmental factors stretch the distribution.
I love the anecdote that people born in the American colonies came back to England to visit family, and were remarkably taller compared to their cousins due to environmental factors.
Re: Hey, wait – is employee performance Gaussian distributed?
#46I would feel better if this was derived from empirical data rather than just rhetoric. This seems super testable, no? There is probably a ton of data already in different industries with regards to productivity. Even if human talent have a Pareto distribution (which is not clear), the people employed by a company are a selected sub-set of that population, which would likely have a different distribution depending on…
The problem is that intellectual productivity is generally not possible to measure directly, so you instead end up with indirect measurements that assume a Gaussian distribution.
IQ is famously Gaussian distributed... mainly because it's defined that way, not because human "intelligence" (good luck defining that) is Gaussian.
If you look at board game Elo ratings (poor test for intelligence but we'll ignore that), they do not follow a Gaussian distribution, even though Elo assumes a Gaussian distribution for game outcomes (but not the population). So that's good evidence that aptitude/skill in intellectual subjects isn't Gaussian (but it's also not Pareto iirc).
Re: Hey, wait – is employee performance Gaussian distributed?
#47I would feel better if this was derived from empirical data rather than just rhetoric. This seems super testable, no? There is probably a ton of data already in different industries with regards to productivity. Even if human talent have a Pareto distribution (which is not clear), the people employed by a company are a selected sub-set of that population, which would likely have a different distribution depending on…
To me it says that our system is built on a reasonable but untested assumption (performance is a gaussian) and by replacing it with an equally reasonable assumption (performance is a pareto), suddenly our system looks stupid. It isn't really offering a solution but a new perspective
Re: Hey, wait – is employee performance Gaussian distributed?
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
For analyses like this it just doesn't matter. Pick a metric and measure it over your workforce. Across the universe of salient metrics of interest you won't see a gaussian across your workforce. In a previous job I modelled this and concluded that due to measurement error and year-over-yead enrichment, Welchian rank-and-yank results in firing people at random.
Stack ranking will tell you when something isn't working, but the solution isn't always to fire, but rather use that data to fix things in a more general solution. I found that team composition and role assignment matters a lot, at least if you hire people who are at least above a certain bar. Match a brilliant non-assertive coder with someone who is outgoing and good at getting along and at least decent coder, and t…
Wholeheartedly agree with you on team composition mattering a ton, but how often do you have such an abundance of engineers and tasks that you can match them up the right way?
Re: Hey, wait – is employee performance Gaussian distributed?
#49I would feel better if this was derived from empirical data rather than just rhetoric. This seems super testable, no? There is probably a ton of data already in different industries with regards to productivity. Even if human talent have a Pareto distribution (which is not clear), the people employed by a company are a selected sub-set of that population, which would likely have a different distribution depending on…
The problem is that intellectual productivity is generally not possible to measure directly, so you instead end up with indirect measurements that assume a Gaussian distribution. IQ is famously Gaussian distributed... mainly because it's defined that way, not because human "intelligence" (good luck defining that) is Gaussian. If you look at board game Elo ratings (poor test for intelligence but we'll ignore that), th…
> so you instead end up with indirect measurements that assume a Gaussian distribution.
100%. I was going to write something similar.
> If you look at board game Elo ratings (poor test for intelligence but we'll ignore that), they do not follow a Gaussian distribution, even though Elo assumes a Gaussian distribution for game outcomes (but not the population). So that's good evidence that aptitude/skill in intellectual subjects isn't Gaussian (but it's also not Pareto iirc).
Interesting, yeah, Elo is quite interesting. And one can view hiring in a company as something like selecting people for Elo above a certain score, but with some type of error distribution on top of that, probably Gaussian error. So what does a one sided Elo distribution look like with gaussian error in picking people above that Elo limit?
Re: Hey, wait – is employee performance Gaussian distributed?
#50I would feel better if this was derived from empirical data rather than just rhetoric. This seems super testable, no? There is probably a ton of data already in different industries with regards to productivity. Even if human talent have a Pareto distribution (which is not clear), the people employed by a company are a selected sub-set of that population, which would likely have a different distribution depending on…
The problem is that intellectual productivity is generally not possible to measure directly, so you instead end up with indirect measurements that assume a Gaussian distribution. IQ is famously Gaussian distributed... mainly because it's defined that way, not because human "intelligence" (good luck defining that) is Gaussian. If you look at board game Elo ratings (poor test for intelligence but we'll ignore that), th…
All polygenic traits would be Gaussian by default under the simplest assumptions.
E.g. if there are N loci, and each locus has X alleles, and some of those alleles increase the trait more than others, the trait will ultimately present in a Gaussian distribution.
i.e. if there are lots of genes that affect IQ, IQ will be a Gaussian curve across population.