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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?

#51

Post by KK7NIL »

bhouston wrote: post #49
KK7NIL wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 intellectua…

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.

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

#52

Post by bhouston »

dataflow wrote: post #48
bhouston wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I think if you get to know your engineers, you can figure out the right pairings to bring out the best. But this requires intimate knowledge and probably subjective based on how good the manager is at managing coders. So I guess from up high, stack ranking-based firing is easier.

But I think it is also cheaper to make great teams rather than just doing brutal firings all the time. But it may be a micro-optimization?

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

#54

Post by munk-a »

Cheer2171 wrote: post #27
bhickey wrote: post #12

Earlier 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.

So you're saying that if you don't think about construct validity and just pick any given metric that can spit out a comparable number across all your different positions and teams, that these metrics have weird distributions? Hmm, I wonder why.

I think it's more charitable to interpret their statement as "for all metrics" rather than "run this experiment once and arbitrarily just chose a single metric". Their statement is a lot more actionable because as much as we've tried to over decades finding an accurate metric to represents performance seems to be an impossible task.

A researcher friend at a previous job once mentioned that in grad school he and several other students were assisting a professor on an experiment and each grad student was given a specific molecule to evaluate in depth for fitness for a need (I forget what at this point) and one of the students had a molecule that was a good fit while the others did not - that student was credited on a major research paper and had an instant advantage in seeking employment as a researcher while the other students did not. That friend of mine was an excellent science communicator and so fell into a hybrid role of being a highly technical salesperson but tell me - what metrics of this scenario would best evaluate the researchers' relative performance? The outcome has a clear cut answer but that was entirely luck based (in a perfect world) - a lot of highly technical fields can have very smart people be stuck on very hard low margin problems while other people luck into a low difficulty problem solution that earns a company millions.

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

#55

Post by dataflow »

alphazard wrote: post #28
riazrizvi wrote: post #4

This 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.

You could replace "employee performance" with "value to the company" and the same argument would hold. Performance is difficult to measure, but we get a good estimate of value to the company any time someone receives a competing offer and drags their manager to the negotiating table. The amount of money the manager is willing to match is the perceived value to the company. This is how the company actually behaves (we…

> The amount of money the manager is willing to match is the perceived value to the company.

This assumes the manager is irrelevant here. But we all know that different managers (or non-managers) can communicate value differently for the same employee. So this metric can't be solely measuring the value of the employee.

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

#56

Post by pama »

bhouston wrote: post #30

I 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…

I thought that Bonus Content #1 and the references down the article were reasonably convincing. It would be great if large companies disclosed such details but it is unlikely.

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

#57

Post by seiferteric »

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?

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

#58

Post by AtlasBarfed »

1) performance reviews are never aligned with employee value, because companies are strongly invested to take excess production from employees and transfer it to management, secondarily shareholders

2) the are also not aligned with the replacement cost of employees because the religion of management is that labor is effortlessly replaceable and low value

3) employee retention is not aligned with corporate performance in Machiavellian middle management, it is aligned with manager promotion for things like loyalty and maintaining fiefdom power, budgetary size, headcount, etc

4) there are no absolute or ever directly derived metrics in software development that have ever worked, to say nothing of other positions

Those are off the top of my head.

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

#59

Post by BiteCode_dev »

riazrizvi wrote: post #4

This 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.

Yes, is performance Pareto, or perception of performance Pareto?

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

#60

Post by KK7NIL »

jlawson wrote: post #50
KK7NIL wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Very interested point, this is a close corollary to the central limit theorem, no?

Doesn't this assume a linear relationship between relevant alleles and the given trait though?

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