5 ms·

> the statistical truth that the worst 10% probably are negative value employees. Why is this a statistical truth? In a large, Gaussian distributed population

by efitz 5y ago

> the statistical truth that the worst 10% probably are negative value employees. Why is this a statistical truth? In a large, Gaussian distributed population MAYBE this is true (but hiring isn’t random, is it?). But the thresholds are not applied to large populations anywhere I’ve worked. It’s pressure applied to management at all levels.

AtlasBarfed 5y ago
It assumes that you have perfect measurement. Anyone who knows corporate politics, middle management machiavellianism, and inability to properly instrument development, requirements, scheduling knows this is a fantasy. That means people will devote SUBSTANTIAL amounts of their day-to-day labor in jockeying and positioning. People will be hired (wasted money and time) explicitly to be fired/PIP'd. The jockeying will result in disruption of team development. People will sabotage their coworkers. Trust disappears. Paranoia grows. Blame deflected. Difficult problems won't be tackled because why risk it. Bandaids rather than solutions will result. YOUR BEST PEOPLE WILL LEAVE. Let me emphasize this. You are selecting for people that aren't good, because good people will have OPTIONS and THEY WILL LEAVE. What are you left with? A management hierarchy of sociopaths. A subpar set of employees that furthermore will not cooperate in good faith (in the best case) or actively engage in institutional sociopathic behavior. You will have a cesspool, and cesspools repulse good people. And the signal is right in front of people that apply: the hiring process is abusive hazing with the "raise the bar" bullshit. Staff turnover means abandoned systems. Abandoned systems will be avoided as bad career risk, or reimplemented before the org has gotten good ROI from them. THAT IS NOT GOOD MANAGEMENT. Remember: AWS had a CRAP Christmas. Crap. This is starting to boil up.
- throwbigdata 5y ago
  To wit: https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-or-the-office-according-to-the-office/ https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-...
  - AtlasBarfed 5y ago
    It's even worse than that. The Office at least had people do their jobs and keep their heads down, cooperate to get things done, ride out the management bullshit. Amazon management practices will breed sociopathy at the root worker level. I agree that is kind of the average-stage evolution of an enterprisey company. Amazon is worse.
    - ltfey 5y ago
      The Office was utopian compared to real-life Corporate America. The kind of mean-spirited pettiness that drives actual post-2000 capitalism, and it gets worse the higher you go, is so depressing and repugnant that it can't be put on TV. Also, characters with no redeeming qualities are considered bad writing. But most coprorate executives are people with no redeeming qualities. You can't put them in fiction; unlike a well-written villain, they'll suck everything into a hole. Even Bill Lumbergh on Office Space had his charms.
      - AtlasBarfed 5y ago
        And thus the "banality of evil"
graycat 5y ago
> In a large, Gaussian distributed population Where do we get one of those? The central limit theorem doesn't give us one of those. Not even the Lindeberg-Feller central limit theorem. Neither does the strong law of large numbers. Nor the weak law of large numbers. Nor the martingale convergence theorem. There is some old material, from about 100 years ago, in schools of education that given a performance measure and a large population the measure will be Gaussian distributed on that population, and the larger the population the closer to a Gaussian distribution. An example is supposed to be the size of the largest eigenvalue in a principle components decomposition. Uh, that largest eigenvalue was long called IQ (intelligence quotient). Nothing intelligent about it. Nonsense. 100% total crackpot nonsense. Brain-dead, cult nonsense. "Low performers" in need of a "performance improvement program" (PIP)? Start with the managers who believe in a Gaussian distribution. Then move to the managers who believe that the "bottom 20%" are always low performers. A lot is known about how to be a good manager, and the Gaussian probability density distribution is not part of that. I've seen a lot of bad managers. A pattern is that they are tyrants, have lots of rules and measures, are big on formality over reality, dot i's and cross t's with great reliability, and have everyone with their nose to the grindstone, ear to the ground, shoulder to the wheel and trying to work in that position. But the organization is stagnant, is not changing or keeping up with the market or technology. So, after a few years like that, it becomes obvious to everyone, customers, BoD, stockholders, employees, even nearly all of the managers that the organization is about ready to die, and often that's what happens, e.g., by firing 50% of the people and going downhill from there. Once I saw a failing organization where nearly all the managers except at the lowest level were part of a tight clique, cult enforcing failure. Finally the BoD installed a new CEO and fairly soon 80+% of the clique, cult were given "PIPs" and demoted out of management or retired. But there is also good evidence that even such a sick organization does not have to die and, instead, just needs some good management, starting at the CEO level. In particular, with a good CEO, suddenly, wonder of wonders, 90+% of the employees can be seen as great performers. So, net, as bad as the situation can be, it is fair to say that Darwin is on the case with improvement on the way! At one time Amazon was a small mail-order book and record shop run by Bezos from a small office. At least looking from 10,000 feet up, Bezos was a good manager, and, thus, I doubt that he was playing with the Gaussian distribution, firing his bottom 20%, stack ranking, etc. Instead he knew all the employees and the work of each. Sooooo, it sounds like now Bezos should leave outer space, return to Amazon, and fix the destructive nonsense that is ruining the company.
throw_nbvc1234 5y ago
Amazon's hiring criteria is that a candidate must be better then 50% of current employee in their role (the bar); this is where the "bar raiser" concept comes from. So from their perspective statistically, half of their current employees wouldn't make it through the interview process if they went through it again.
- steveBK123 5y ago
  This is magical numbers thinking by shape rotators. How does one qualify the new candidate being better than 50% of current team. Better than 50% at what? Every role has many dimensions, and most members of the team have a mixed set of strengths. You form a cohesive package if you hire complementary people and get 2+2=5 type of output. The idea that everyone can be treated as an interchangeable cog and objectively, quantitatively ranked is pure silliness.

by efitz 5y ago

AtlasBarfed 5y ago

It assumes that you have perfect measurement. Anyone who knows corporate politics, middle management machiavellianism, and inability to properly instrument development, requirements, scheduling knows this is a fantasy. That means people will devote SUBSTANTIAL amounts of their day-to-day labor in jockeying and positioning. People will be hired (wasted money and time) explicitly to be fired/PIP'd. The jockeying will result in disruption of team development. People will sabotage their coworkers. Trust disappears. Paranoia grows. Blame deflected. Difficult problems won't be tackled because why risk it. Bandaids rather than solutions will result. YOUR BEST PEOPLE WILL LEAVE. Let me emphasize this. You are selecting for people that aren't good, because good people will have OPTIONS and THEY WILL LEAVE. What are you left with? A management hierarchy of sociopaths. A subpar set of employees that furthermore will not cooperate in good faith (in the best case) or actively engage in institutional sociopathic behavior. You will have a cesspool, and cesspools repulse good people. And the signal is right in front of people that apply: the hiring process is abusive hazing with the "raise the bar" bullshit. Staff turnover means abandoned systems. Abandoned systems will be avoided as bad career risk, or reimplemented before the org has gotten good ROI from them. THAT IS NOT GOOD MANAGEMENT. Remember: AWS had a CRAP Christmas. Crap. This is starting to boil up.

throwbigdata 5y ago
To wit: https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-or-the-office-according-to-the-office/ https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-...
- AtlasBarfed 5y ago
  It's even worse than that. The Office at least had people do their jobs and keep their heads down, cooperate to get things done, ride out the management bullshit. Amazon management practices will breed sociopathy at the root worker level. I agree that is kind of the average-stage evolution of an enterprisey company. Amazon is worse.
  - ltfey 5y ago
    The Office was utopian compared to real-life Corporate America. The kind of mean-spirited pettiness that drives actual post-2000 capitalism, and it gets worse the higher you go, is so depressing and repugnant that it can't be put on TV. Also, characters with no redeeming qualities are considered bad writing. But most coprorate executives are people with no redeeming qualities. You can't put them in fiction; unlike a well-written villain, they'll suck everything into a hole. Even Bill Lumbergh on Office Space had his charms.
    - AtlasBarfed 5y ago
      And thus the "banality of evil"

graycat 5y ago

> In a large, Gaussian distributed population Where do we get one of those? The central limit theorem doesn't give us one of those. Not even the Lindeberg-Feller central limit theorem. Neither does the strong law of large numbers. Nor the weak law of large numbers. Nor the martingale convergence theorem. There is some old material, from about 100 years ago, in schools of education that given a performance measure and a large population the measure will be Gaussian distributed on that population, and the larger the population the closer to a Gaussian distribution. An example is supposed to be the size of the largest eigenvalue in a principle components decomposition. Uh, that largest eigenvalue was long called IQ (intelligence quotient). Nothing intelligent about it. Nonsense. 100% total crackpot nonsense. Brain-dead, cult nonsense. "Low performers" in need of a "performance improvement program" (PIP)? Start with the managers who believe in a Gaussian distribution. Then move to the managers who believe that the "bottom 20%" are always low performers. A lot is known about how to be a good manager, and the Gaussian probability density distribution is not part of that. I've seen a lot of bad managers. A pattern is that they are tyrants, have lots of rules and measures, are big on formality over reality, dot i's and cross t's with great reliability, and have everyone with their nose to the grindstone, ear to the ground, shoulder to the wheel and trying to work in that position. But the organization is stagnant, is not changing or keeping up with the market or technology. So, after a few years like that, it becomes obvious to everyone, customers, BoD, stockholders, employees, even nearly all of the managers that the organization is about ready to die, and often that's what happens, e.g., by firing 50% of the people and going downhill from there. Once I saw a failing organization where nearly all the managers except at the lowest level were part of a tight clique, cult enforcing failure. Finally the BoD installed a new CEO and fairly soon 80+% of the clique, cult were given "PIPs" and demoted out of management or retired. But there is also good evidence that even such a sick organization does not have to die and, instead, just needs some good management, starting at the CEO level. In particular, with a good CEO, suddenly, wonder of wonders, 90+% of the employees can be seen as great performers. So, net, as bad as the situation can be, it is fair to say that Darwin is on the case with improvement on the way! At one time Amazon was a small mail-order book and record shop run by Bezos from a small office. At least looking from 10,000 feet up, Bezos was a good manager, and, thus, I doubt that he was playing with the Gaussian distribution, firing his bottom 20%, stack ranking, etc. Instead he knew all the employees and the work of each. Sooooo, it sounds like now Bezos should leave outer space, return to Amazon, and fix the destructive nonsense that is ruining the company.

throw_nbvc1234 5y ago

Amazon's hiring criteria is that a candidate must be better then 50% of current employee in their role (the bar); this is where the "bar raiser" concept comes from. So from their perspective statistically, half of their current employees wouldn't make it through the interview process if they went through it again.

steveBK123 5y ago
This is magical numbers thinking by shape rotators. How does one qualify the new candidate being better than 50% of current team. Better than 50% at what? Every role has many dimensions, and most members of the team have a mixed set of strengths. You form a cohesive package if you hire complementary people and get 2+2=5 type of output. The idea that everyone can be treated as an interchangeable cog and objectively, quantitatively ranked is pure silliness.