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Hey, wait – is employee performance Gaussian distributed?

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

#91

Post by KK7NIL »

EnergyAmy wrote: post #81
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…

Do you have a reference for Elo ratings not being Gaussian? A casual search shows lots of graphs and discussions saying it is.

Look at my reply to bhouston.

Elo ratings for active players are close to Gaussian, but not quite, they show a very clear asymmetry, especially for OTB old school Elo (compared to online Glicko-2).

The active players restriction is a big one and one I didn't assume I in my original statement.

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

#92

Post by stoperaticless »

diggan wrote: post #76
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 Performance management, as practiced in many large corporations in 2024, is an outdated technology that is in need of an update Author made a couple of fundamental mistakes: the first is they assume employees are (or should be) paid according to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…

> 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…

There is no way to unambiguosly decide who is responsible for which earnings.

Hipothetical two people cooperative that produces simple hammers. One specializes on wooden part, the other on metal part. How much each of them earned to the company? (Or producing and selling; or one spending his lifesavings to buy pricey hammer-making-equipment while other presses buttons on said equipment)

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

#93

Post by jonas21 »

dangus wrote: post #88
jedberg wrote: post #65

One of the things I loved about working at Netflix was that the base assumption was that everyone was a top performer. If you weren't a top performer, you were given a severance check. The analogy we used was a sports team. Pro sports teams have really good players and great players. Some people are superstars, but unless you're at least really really good you're not on the team. Performance and compensation were com…

In summary, Netflix told all their employees that they are so amazing at their job, they are the top 10% of the whole world, they are like NFL athletes. If they don't perform to top tier levels, they'll be shown the door. Here's a thought experiment: pretend that Netflix is lying and that their employees are not actually made up of the top 10% of talent industrywide. Let's for this thought experiment assume the reali…

Most Netflix employees have worked at other places and can make the comparison for themselves. They don't have to take Netflix' word for it.

Also, since when is telling people they're good at what they do "worker-harming psychological manipulation?"

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

#94

Post by sangnoir »

philipov wrote: post #86

> How much revenue do you think a janitor or café staffer generates? Close to zero. The same goes for engineering. Someone has to do the unglamorous staff, or you end up with a dysfunctional company, with amazing talent (on paper). If the company would be dysfunctional without that janitor or software engineer, and not bring in as much revenue as a result, it sounds like the model that attributes close to zero revenu…

Sound like you're expecting employers to strive for fairness. Instead, they are striving for profits for the capital class. The labor class gets the minimum possible amount to reach the shareholders primary goal.

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

#95

Post by bhouston »

JackFr wrote: post #89
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.

Good question - do the bad players play less because they are bad, or are they bad because they play less?

> Good question - do the bad players play less because they are bad, or are they bad because they play less?

Both for sure. If you don't practice you will never rise much about bad. But if you are bad and not progressing you won't play much because it isn't rewarding to lose.

One needs to almost figure out those with low ELO ratings, what is their history compared to the number of games played and see if they were following an expected ELO progression.

I wonder if you can estimate with any accuracy where a player will eventually plateau given just a small-ish sampling of their first games. Basically estimate the trajectory based on how they start and progress. This would be interesting. Given how studied Chess is, I expect this is already done to some extent somewhere.

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

#96

Post by creer »

brabel wrote: post #66
jedberg wrote: post #65

One of the things I loved about working at Netflix was that the base assumption was that everyone was a top performer. If you weren't a top performer, you were given a severance check. The analogy we used was a sports team. Pro sports teams have really good players and great players. Some people are superstars, but unless you're at least really really good you're not on the team. Performance and compensation were com…

It's really difficult for me to believe that they really got 10% top performers. For one, knowing the cut-throat nature of employment there, I would expect only a minority of developers would be willing to try working there, despite the awesome rewards. Another reason I really don't trust that to be true is that I've never seen a good way to measure who is a top performer and who is not. I don't think there's one, pe…

> difficult for me to believe that they really got 10% top performers

It's difficult to achieve, but it's not an unreasonable objective to have. After that there is a question of measurement. How do you measure that? Did they? What was their score? - and yes, until the evidence is released, they probably didn't. (But I would also cut slack on the measurement - it IS difficult to measure so a decent attempt - a top 10% attempt? - will do.)

Where the "top performers" meme obviously fails is when every new business and their sister claims the same thing. We are all winners here and all that.

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

#97

Post by marcosdumay »

ianbicking wrote: post #67

"IQ is Gaussian" – it was pointed out somewhere, and only then became obvious to me, that IQ is not Gaussian. The distribution is manufactured. If you have 1000 possible IQ questions, you can ask a bunch of people those questions, and then pick out 100 questions that form a Gaussian distribution. This is how IQ tests are created. This is not unreasonable... if you picked out 100 super easy questions you wouldn't get…

It's worse, because every test is obviously bounded, and it's absurd to not expect some noise to be there.

Join those two, and the test only becomes reasonable near the middle. But the middle is exactly where the pick of questions makes the most difference.

All said, this means that IQ is kinda useful for sociological studies with large samples. But if you use it you are adding error, it's not reasonable to expect that error not to correlate with whatever you are looking at (since nobody understands it well), and it's not reasonable to expect the results to be stable. And it's really useless to make decisions based on small sample sizes.

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

#98

Post by philipov »

sangnoir wrote: post #94
philipov wrote: post #86

> How much revenue do you think a janitor or café staffer generates? Close to zero. The same goes for engineering. Someone has to do the unglamorous staff, or you end up with a dysfunctional company, with amazing talent (on paper). If the company would be dysfunctional without that janitor or software engineer, and not bring in as much revenue as a result, it sounds like the model that attributes close to zero revenu…

Sound like you're expecting employers to strive for fairness. Instead, they are striving for profits for the capital class. The labor class gets the minimum possible amount to reach the shareholders primary goal.

It sounds like you're confusing what they do currently and what the system should be set up to encourage instead. That things are broken right now is not a valid argument in favor of the status quo. The point you make only proves why it is so important that unions should have as much economic power as corporations do, so that the buy and sell sides of the labor market have negotiation parity.

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

#99

Post by sangnoir »

philipov wrote: post #98
sangnoir wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sound like you're expecting employers to strive for fairness. Instead, they are striving for profits for the capital class. The labor class gets the minimum possible amount to reach the shareholders primary goal.

It sounds like you're confusing what they do currently and what the system should be set up to encourage instead. That things are broken right now is not a valid argument in favor of the status quo. The point you make only proves why it is so important that unions should have as much economic power as corporations do, so that the buy and sell sides of the labor market have negotiation parity.

I'm being descriptive, bot prescriptive: I'm stating what the priorities are under a capitalist system without the rose-colored glasses offered by the Just-world fallacy.

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

#100

Post by Bootvis »

KK7NIL wrote: post #60
jlawson wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

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