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This is very unconvincing. The author already admits one reason why:

> But there are low-performing employees at large corporations; we’ve all seen them. My perspective is that they’re hiring errors. Yes, hiring errors should be addressed, but it’s not clear that there’s an obvious specific percentage of the workforce that is the result of hiring errors.

I think it is clear that we expect a certain percentage of hiring "errors". And that they are not binary but rather a continuum. And that there are lots of other factors like employees who were great when they were hired but stopped caring and are "coasting" or just burnt out, who got promoted or transferred when they shouldn't have been and are bad at their new level/role, and so forth.

The Pareto distribution isn't particularly relevant here, because a hiring process isn't trying to get a whole slice of the overall labor market with clear cutoffs. For any position, it's trying to maximize the performance it can get at a given salary, and we have no reason to expect the errors it makes in under- and over-estimating performance to be anything but relatively symmetric.

So a Gaussian distribution is a far more reasonable assumption than a slice of the Pareto distribution, when you look at the multiplicity of factors involved.

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dheera 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

Personally I think manager/report mismatches are far greater than hiring errors.

When A doesn't like B it doesn't mean A or B are necessarily unfit to work at the company, but it generally results in the subordinate being framed as underperforming or not being given the resources to perform.

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wavemode 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

> So a Gaussian distribution is a far more reasonable assumption than a slice of the Pareto distribution

It's not an assumption. See the evidence referenced in the footnotes.

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crazygringo 3 days ago | parent [-]

Incorrect.

It is absolutely an assumption. The "evidence" in the footnotes is about national salary data. Not the distribution for any individual position at a company.

And it is entirely possible (and probable) that performance at each position is distributed as a Gaussian, and all those Gaussians add up to a Pareto at a population level.

But you simply cannot take national-level data and assume it applies at the micro level. That's not how statistics works.

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wavemode 3 days ago | parent [-]

> And it is entirely possible (and probable) that performance at each position is distributed as a Gaussian

Find me any research agreeing with this statement

(spoiler - you won't, because researchers have broadly reached consensus to the opposite)

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crazygringo 2 days ago | parent [-]

OK, can you point us to that consensus please? Anything published?

I would have thought that if there were literature on that consensus, the author would have cited it. But they didn't. And the entire tone of their article is speculative.

Gaussians are generally considered the default assumption for a process with an error term with unrestricted movement in both directions, until shown otherwise.

	▲	wavemode 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		> OK, can you point us to that consensus please? Anything published? Here's just one article - it references numerous studies and meta-studies, broadly making the case that Pareto distributions tend to fit real-world data better than Gaussian (including employee performance, if you observe the section titled "Managing People"): https://hbr.org/2022/01/we-need-to-let-go-of-the-bell-curve