Comment by baldfat | Hacker News Reader

Comment by baldfat | Hacker News Reader

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> If you work in an average company who hires average people and you are well above average you quickly risk becoming exactly that.

I liked Steven Covey's 7 Habits take on this much more "Sharpen the Saw." This approach and wording puts all the blame on those around you. That is very good to think your above those around you and that you are above average.

A) Nothing wrong with average half the people are below average

B) Rating someone top 5% is totally a perception unless your in something that can be measured easily (Think fast 100m Dash or the author's bowling)

C) Having hired dozens of people for different jobs I can tell you that my top 5% at higher usually ended up being drama and the one person I just hired because I needed a body ASAP ended up being hands down my best employee. (Look at how Google has changed their hiring practices because hiring is close to impossible to get right, think NCAA Brackets)

D) Self-deception - Everyone believes their kid is above average and self-delusion inflates our own self-assessment. Blaming those around you give you a great out of self-responsibility.

A) Nothing wrong with average half the people are below average

This isn't necessarily true. Imagine a system where we could rate developers. There are 4 'A' developers (92,95,97,91) and 2 'B' developers (83, 85). Only 1/3 of the developers are 'below average' as compared to below median, and flip those numbers around and 2/3 are below average. This is kind of important when evaluating the type of company culture that you're in. Is it a place where there are a lot of 'top 5%' developers, and a short tail of good, but not great developers. Or is it a place where there are just one or two developers that doing 'A' work, but a long tail of developers doing solid, but not great work. The 'average' could be misleading in these cases.

Wow I have a Theology/Philosophy degree and I have seen what I can Theology/Philosophy gymnastics to make some wierd basic fact of life into a totally different thing. You might have missed your calling.

Average = Average you have 100 developers 49 and below are bellow average :P

> Average = Average you have 100 developers 49 and below are bellow average

Not exactly. Average is defined as the 50th percentile, which if you have 100 developers, and can (objectively) rank them in order from 1 to 100, then there is a chance that 49 and below are not "average" or "worse than average." Consider a sample distribution where all 100 employees rank exactly the same. Now all 100 are average. Consider a sample distribution that takes on a bi or tri-modal form, where employee groups cluster at certain knowledge or experience levels. Here you might find that "average" is hard to quantify, as it is not well defined when your distribution does not follow "normal" rules.

What is the average of [1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 2, 2, 10]? How many entries are below the average?

No: Dealing with 10,000 People

We are talking rank so top person ranked 10,000 and the bottom is 1. 10,000 - 5,000 are Above Average and the 4,999 to 1 are Bellow Average.

What you showed was some abstract numbers that have nothing to do with ranking.

Nobody said we were using ranking. And we shouldn't, because ranking is misleading (it loses information by hiding the size of the gaps).

But even assuming it's a ranking - in a ranking there's possibility of equal rankings, right?

So, you can have rankings [1, 1, 1, 1, ..., 1, 10000], and the "average=median" assumption is violated again.

Most real-world distributions have different average and median values, the "50% is below average" is a common misconception that should be cleared out.

For one important example see average salary - huge majority of people in (almost) every country earn less than average salary in that country.

How is this NOT ranking. You are using the logical fallacy of Reification (the turning of something abstract into a concrete thing or object) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reification_%28fallacy%29. What real world example at all works with numbers like you are saying "[1, 1, 1, 1, ..., 1, 10000]". When you are talking about specific people with specific skills you can't go abstract. Average when talking a population group in skills is ranking just like in Standardized Testing. Yes half the children in the America are bellow average and the larger the number the more this is true. Likewise the lower the number the less this is true. We are talking tens of thousands of people.

EDIT: Oh I think you looking at this like average house hold income with Bill Gates throwing off the average possibly? Well we are talking about only one thing and that is the skills of a programmer compared to the skills fo other programmers. Just the same as the average math skills of children. This is why we have percentiles and my argument still holds on. Skills are not like money where one person has $60,000,000,000 and another has $100.

Call it "median developer" and I'm OK with that. Average is a different thing. Median developer is by definition a developer that is better or equal to 50% of developers.

> the turning of something abstract into a concrete thing or object

We're talking abstractions from the start. The only abstraction all my posts here rely on is the assumption that skill level is 1-dimensional. And you started using that assumption (by referring to average developer).

Real world example:

There are 10000 programmers. Many of the programmers that are just starting to learn have similar skills to each other. Some of them work for a few years already. Their skill levels start to diverge. Many of them never develop their skills too much (because they never need to and aren't self-motivated enough). Some of the programmers got lucky, work in places that allow/require them to learn forever, and become very, very good. There are few of them, and their skills vary widely.

There are tons of people near the bottom, and very few people near the top. It's natural consequence of the amount of work and focus it takes to move from the bottom to the top.

Ranking them hides some of the differences, but not all (because it's much more common for people to have the same rank near the low end of the spectrum, where there is much more of them, than near the top - where there is just a few people separated by big gaps). So, when you took ranks from these people you would get sth like below (1=worst, 10000=best, if your ranking works the other way - reverse it it still works the same)

[1 (repeated 20 times), 2 (repeated 15 times), 3 (repeated 10 times), 4(repeated 5 times), ..., 100, ..., 10000] - so the distribution would still be skewed and the average would still be different from the median value.

Average in statistics contains the following mean, median, mode, range and more. This (Not trying to be mean or saying you are trying to do this) pseudo-intelligent attack on average because they heard a cool attack on mean when it comes to income inequality isn't pertinent to speaking about above and bellow average.

Real world example: It is still an non-measurable skill set.

> so the distribution would still be skewed and the average would still be different from the median value

You also mixing up vocabulary your still taking average = mean BUT average also means median.

Here is real world ranking of skills (Math, Science, English and Reading) http://blog.prepscholar.com/act-percentiles-and-score-rankin...

Once again what scores are you comparing? When I went to Graduate School I had to do GRE and MAT test and I needed to be over 70% percentile on the test just to be average in my field of study (Theology (highest of all fields of study while Education had one of the lowest scores which makes me laugh) This had HUGE implications on my later PhD program acceptance. I couldn't say I was above average in my field because I scored really high. I had to be better then well over 75% of the people taking the test in my field of study. Just because there are a ton of beginners that start and leave that doesn't mean that there isn't a middle and that middle ground will have great skills above the learners. I counter the argument on this paper discounting average developers and placing the blame on their co-workers and environment. Average workers are not to be looked down on.

To even speak about any average you have to have total order defined. And also addition and division (if you speak about arithmetic one).

What is the average fruit from a set of 10 different apples and 3 different oranges?

It was your assumption that skill level of 2 developers can be compared.

And it's not an useless theorethical distinction. In lay terms: most programmers are worse than average skill level of all programmers.

I even showed you real world example. IT is growing very fast, so most people are beginners.

I'm not trying to look down on anybody. Being better developer doesn't mean you are a better person, and I'm not above average IMO anyway.

EDIT: I looked it up (I'm not native English speaker), and you were right about the math terminology. In Polish average=mean=średnia. Damn false friends. So, if you meant average as median I agree.

No problem. I just get upset that people take a short quote and then decide to force it on everything associated with it.

Due look at the link for ACT Test (For college admission) this kind of shows how to make an average of skills and rank them with a population group. In statistics you can do just about anything and it can be scary but there is always a middle and it just depends on your decision on what is the best tool to use.

Have a great day.

>Look at how Google has changed their hiring practices because hiring is close to impossible to get right

How has Google changed their hiring practices?

They used to ask ridiculous non-math / non-CS questions like "how many golf balls can be stuffed inside a bus" just to see how you respond. Taking these questions out only leaves the esoteric math, stats, CS questions a la "Cracking The Coding Interview". So for guys like us trying to get in, unfortunately it doesn't make much of a difference :/

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