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This is one glaring example of corporate stupidity. I couldn't ever overlook the gross misunderstanding of statistics here. The "bell curve" is an asymptotic d
by altrego99 13y ago
This is one glaring example of corporate stupidity.
I couldn't ever overlook the gross misunderstanding of statistics here. The "bell curve" is an asymptotic distribution law, and even assuming that the distribution of performance is indeed normal, it is outright idiotic to fit the bell curve with as low as 10 people. The chance that no one out of 10 random people will be really at the lowest 5% of performance, is as high as 60%. The HR even uses an Excel sheet to even draw a normal distribution...
I have seen many good people's careers stopped in my farm (and it is a big farm), because of this "bell curve".
- X4 13y agoThey should've hired a mathematician to at least analyse who should not be fired.
- asdfologist 13y agoWhere does it say it's applied to teams of 10 people? When MSFT had stack ranking, it had a minimum team size (though I'm not sure what it was).
- leurl7 13y agoSo what? Statistics is not about fitting data points on a curve... And arguably HR is even less about that!
- bowlofpetunias 13y agoI yield to your superior knowledge of statistics (I have none), but that's not the point. Layoffs are about speed, not accuracy. The faster they're done, the less damage they do. The only thing that matters besides the number of people to lay off is not losing your best people, which comes down to speed (the longer the mess lasts, the more likely your best people will leave) and being accurate enough to not accidentally lay off your best people. Seems to me that stack racking, however awful it is ethically, emotionally and statistically, at least covers that well enough.
- PhasmaFelis 13y agoI'm not sure "it may wreck all our shit, but at least it wrecks our shit quickly" is a point in favor. Rather the opposite, really.