Not everyone can be average. Half of people will be below average.

I might not agree with the point, but I can see that idea that many things just need to be "good enough" (which we might define as "average") and we save our real expertise for the things that really matter.

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sva_ 11 hours ago | parent [-]

> Half of people will be below average.

s/average/median

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jagged-chisel 11 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I 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.

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wongarsu 11 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The 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

	▲	skeeter2020 5 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		there 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.
	▲	programjames 11 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		It is almost never true. If you filter people you're going to get a Pareto distribution.

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paulddraper 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Median is a type of average.

Though usually "average" implies arithmetic mean.

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11 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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