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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 gr

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.

chambers 2y ago
On a meta note, you're right to note that unclear terms undermine our collective reasoning, despite a proper chain of propositions. I've found Term Logic[1] to be useful for figuring out why certain discussions confuse me. I've also used to avoid unnecessary arguments by seeing if the participants are starting with clear concepts (signaled by terms). [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Term_logic#Basics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Term_logic#Basics also this explainer https://adoroergosum.blogspot.com/2015/05/the-three-acts-of-mind-pt-13.html https://adoroergosum.blogspot.com/2015/05/the-three-acts-of-...
michaelmior 2y ago
I'm not sure this is the argument the author is making, but you could claim that the rest of the argument is true for any (or most) reasonable measure of employee performance that a company actually cares about.
- nradov 2y ago
  You could claim anything, but is there hard quantitative data to support such a claim? Or are we just guessing?
  - michaelmior 2y ago
    The author presents some data in the article. Also, the absence of hard quantitative data doesn't necessarily make it a complete guess. (At least not any more than starting with the assumption of a Gaussian distribution.)
bhickey 2y ago
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.
- pembrook 2y ago
  All of Jack Welch’s management tactics should be considered suspect now. His performance at GE was 100% fueled by financial leveraging that blew up in 2009, basically killing the company. Nobody should be taking management lessons from this guy.
  - lotsofpulp 2y ago
    > Nobody should be taking management lessons from this guy. Rank and yank is simply about lowering labor costs, once the business has achieved a significant moat and no longer needs to focus solely on growing revenues. A negotiating tool for the labor buyer, due to the continuous threat of termination.
- Cheer2171 2y ago
  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.
  - munk-a 2y ago
    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.
mitthrowaway2 2y ago
The article does briefly caution about measuring difficulties. But given that the main conclusion is an argument against stack-ranking-and-firing, the question of "what is performance" passes forward to whatever metric the stack-ranking manager was going to use when they were planning to fire the "bottom" 10% of their payroll.
timdellinger 2y ago
Oh, the answer to that is apparent enough, but frustratingly circular: Performance is "visibly doing the things that the company rewards during the performance review process". Theoretically, each role at a company should have a set of articulated accomplishments that are expected. (This is sadly often not the case.) But you're right that the subjective nature of "performance", and the lack of a clear numerical scale, are a difficulty of the entire process!
SideburnsOfDoom 2y ago
It also assumes that "productivity" is something that is meaningful at all at the level of individuals, not teams or larger. IMHO, it is not.
alphazard 2y ago
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 know for sure whether they match the offer or not) and that behavior implies a value to the company, regardless of what anyone says in performance review season.
- dataflow 2y ago
  > 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.
  - alphazard 2y ago
    You are talking about value as some intrinsic quality. I'm talking about value as a belief that is subjectively assigned, and that we can infer from actions. We can all agree on the actions, and we can agree on the possible beliefs that an action can imply. The action to not match an offer implies that the company believes the employee adds less value than their new offer. If the company believed the employee was adding more value than their new offer, they would match the offer to keep the employee. A company isn't a single rational agent. It's made up of people performing different functions. But behaving irrationally is a categorically bad thing for the company to do, and the leadership has a fiduciary duty to prevent the company from acting irrationally or otherwise not in its own self interest. The manager may matter here, but the leadership is supposed to be creating a management structure such that the company acts rationally to make progress towards set goals.
BiteCode_dev 2y ago
Yes, is performance Pareto, or perception of performance Pareto?

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.

chambers 2y ago

On a meta note, you're right to note that unclear terms undermine our collective reasoning, despite a proper chain of propositions. I've found Term Logic[1] to be useful for figuring out why certain discussions confuse me. I've also used to avoid unnecessary arguments by seeing if the participants are starting with clear concepts (signaled by terms). [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Term_logic#Basics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Term_logic#Basics also this explainer https://adoroergosum.blogspot.com/2015/05/the-three-acts-of-mind-pt-13.html https://adoroergosum.blogspot.com/2015/05/the-three-acts-of-...

michaelmior 2y ago

I'm not sure this is the argument the author is making, but you could claim that the rest of the argument is true for any (or most) reasonable measure of employee performance that a company actually cares about.

nradov 2y ago
You could claim anything, but is there hard quantitative data to support such a claim? Or are we just guessing?
- michaelmior 2y ago
  The author presents some data in the article. Also, the absence of hard quantitative data doesn't necessarily make it a complete guess. (At least not any more than starting with the assumption of a Gaussian distribution.)

bhickey 2y ago

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.

pembrook 2y ago
All of Jack Welch’s management tactics should be considered suspect now. His performance at GE was 100% fueled by financial leveraging that blew up in 2009, basically killing the company. Nobody should be taking management lessons from this guy.
- lotsofpulp 2y ago
  > Nobody should be taking management lessons from this guy. Rank and yank is simply about lowering labor costs, once the business has achieved a significant moat and no longer needs to focus solely on growing revenues. A negotiating tool for the labor buyer, due to the continuous threat of termination.
Cheer2171 2y ago
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.
- munk-a 2y ago
  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.

mitthrowaway2 2y ago

The article does briefly caution about measuring difficulties. But given that the main conclusion is an argument against stack-ranking-and-firing, the question of "what is performance" passes forward to whatever metric the stack-ranking manager was going to use when they were planning to fire the "bottom" 10% of their payroll.

timdellinger 2y ago

Oh, the answer to that is apparent enough, but frustratingly circular: Performance is "visibly doing the things that the company rewards during the performance review process". Theoretically, each role at a company should have a set of articulated accomplishments that are expected. (This is sadly often not the case.) But you're right that the subjective nature of "performance", and the lack of a clear numerical scale, are a difficulty of the entire process!

SideburnsOfDoom 2y ago

It also assumes that "productivity" is something that is meaningful at all at the level of individuals, not teams or larger. IMHO, it is not.

alphazard 2y ago

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 know for sure whether they match the offer or not) and that behavior implies a value to the company, regardless of what anyone says in performance review season.

dataflow 2y ago
> 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.
- alphazard 2y ago
  You are talking about value as some intrinsic quality. I'm talking about value as a belief that is subjectively assigned, and that we can infer from actions. We can all agree on the actions, and we can agree on the possible beliefs that an action can imply. The action to not match an offer implies that the company believes the employee adds less value than their new offer. If the company believed the employee was adding more value than their new offer, they would match the offer to keep the employee. A company isn't a single rational agent. It's made up of people performing different functions. But behaving irrationally is a categorically bad thing for the company to do, and the leadership has a fiduciary duty to prevent the company from acting irrationally or otherwise not in its own self interest. The manager may matter here, but the leadership is supposed to be creating a management structure such that the company acts rationally to make progress towards set goals.

BiteCode_dev 2y ago

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