> Half of people will be below average.

s/average/median

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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