3 ms·
> Half of people will be below average. s/average/median
by sva_ 6mo ago
> Half of people will be below average.
s/average/median
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- jagged-chisel 6mo agoI don’t believe this is a meaningful distinction when we’re not going to agree on how to judge performance of software engineers. If this were solely about income, it might be an important distinction.
- wongarsu 6mo agoThe article assumes a normal distribution, making the distinction moot But it is useful to question whether that is true in all cases. The cases that aren't normal-distributed might be exactly the cases where it pays off to be neither average or median
- programjames 6mo agoIt is almost never true. If you filter people you're going to get a Pareto distribution.
- skeeter2020 6mo agothere is a major shortcoming in this assumption; everything we've seen related to the internet and technology in general suggests there is rarely a normal distribution. I think it's way more valuable ato frame the questions as a long tail (pareto) distribution and a "good enough" cut-off point.
- paulddraper 6mo agoMedian is a type of average. Though usually "average" implies arithmetic mean.