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Comment by stephencanon | Hacker News Reader

I've never tried it, but I suspect you'll run into the same issue that sports does, where "assists" don't accurately reflect the people who are making things happen on the court.

We miss the perimeter shooter who positions themselves just so to pull two defenders out of position, but give credit to the point guard who makes the now-easy pass for the "assist". It's entirely possible for the person most responsible for a play succeeding to never touch the ball. You really want something like value-above-replacement, but that's pretty hard to measure without a clear definition of what "success" is and reams of data.

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> We miss the perimeter shooter who positions themselves just so to pull two defenders out of position, but give credit to the point guard who makes the now-easy pass for the "assist".

The NBA has an advanced metric for that called gravity. As you could imagine Steph Curry's gravity is through the roof.

Another related metric is +/- for when a player is on the floor. That one is more nebulous and error prone but it is meant to describe a player's impact on the floor outside of things like assists, points, rebounds, etc.

> The NBA has an advanced metric for that called gravity. As you could imagine Steph Curry's gravity is through the roof.

Happen to have any additional reading on that? (only if it's a handy link for you, otherwise I'll google it). I've re-started watching NBA recently after about 20 years or so, and it's the first time when I hear about this concept, one which sounds very intriguing and interesting. Maybe it was also used 20 years ago, but back then I didn't have access to Internet and as I don't live in the States the local sports newspapers (which care more about football/soccer) weren't mentioning it.

I can't think of any one particular article that goes into the details of gravity and some of the related metrics (respect and distraction being the others). Maybe lookup NBA gravity scores and SportVU. I believe the company that sells the SportVU system are the primary ones tracking that metric (and delivering it to teams).

Have a look into this ESPN article (http://www.espn.com/nba/story/_/id/11744634/explaining-gravi...), it touches on the determining factors and how it's quantified.

Gravity isn’t metricized (and it would be hard to do so), the best we can do at the moment is indirectly measure it via +/- or other stats like what SC30’s teammates’ true shooting percentages are with him on and off the floor.

I think it's something that might be quantized through SportVU and the advanced analytics they provide, but not published anywhere to the public.

Second Spectrum has supplanted SportsVU for tracking, and is also the generator for all the advanced metrics that are now provided for the NBA as well as ESPN.

Ice hockey also has the +/- metric, and as a defenseman that doesn't get a lot of goals and assists, I'm glad it's there.

You're forgetting that you could also track secondhand assist as well.

I can't speak for programming but in soccer this is well-known. It's just very hard to Value just like an employer would in terms of having that person on board for morale. Fortunately the better people get it and understand that that person should be value even if they weren't directly involved in making the change but they were definitely a part of it.

This is what plagues me with most corporate companies in the United States. It should be about teamwork not about what this person did or I did, rather what the team did.

Sure you can value people individually, but teams trump individuals all day long in the long run.

That's a huge reason why I strongly dislike OKRs especially in an Agile environment and even more when people pair program.

A person’s projected morale is very under-appreciated. I don’t know if I’m at the point in my career that I boost morale just by being on the team, but I do know there are people who, if they left my company, would have an impact on my morale even though I never ask them for help or work directly with them.

Just something about knowing a person is an amazing and knowledgeable resource and he’s choosing to work here of all places is a subtle morale boost. When they decide to leave, others might start asking “well if that guy left, am I still making the right decision to stay?”

I’m sure we’ve all experienced someone important leaving our company and having a waterfall of turnover that follows it. That is very disruptive and more should have been done to keep that one employee or at least keep the rest that followed them out the door.

I wish I had more than one upvote. This comment is so true it hurts. Thank you for articulating it so well. =)

I've seen people like that, and I've been that guy. Ironically, I've been that guy only because I left years after those other men and women that I'd looked up to had moved on, and I'd filled their role for the junior devs who were hired after.

Moving on is a fact of life, more so now that ever. My parents both worked for the same company over 35-40 years before they retired; I don't think I can imagine that'll be even close to the norm for many in the workforce now (especially software / other tech).

A family friend (manages a programming group) kept a basically incompetent but calming, friendly programmer on her team for 2-3 years because of his effect on the emotional state of the rest of the team. She his pay was worth it for that reason. Unfortunately the company's owner eventually realized that he was paying the salary of someone who couldn't program and fired him.

The problem is much more about underperforming teams than well or overperforming teams. In order to dissect the problems of an underperforming team, they need some objective metric (even if it doesn't tell the whole story) to look to, or else you have to deal with people flinging accusations around and poisoning the entire culture.

This is what +/- and its variants are for. Especially useful for sports like hockey where scoring is rare. Of course, in a work environment this is even harder to try and measure, if for no other reason than that people are almost never 'off the court' and if they are there are many confounding factors.

Scoring in hocker is rare? Scoring in football^Wsoccer is even rarer :)

That's why they have a million statistics, these days. Goals, assists, distance covered, top speed, region of the pitch most used, etc.

Yeah, there's a bunch of advanced stats that more accurately model this in sports. My point is twofold:

(a) despite the existence of better stats, a lot of people still care about goals/assists, because they're much easier to understand.

(b) the difficulty of measuring these stats in low-scoring sports (soccer, hockey) is greatly magnified in business; instead of scoring O(1) points per hour, a small software team may "score a point" every couple weeks or quarter or year. Additionally, the number of people contributing is often greater, and we see fewer "identical lineup, but with player A swapped out for player B" situations (and ~never for long enough to get meaningful stats about "points scored").

This is what I worry about, and what I hope to avoid by asking who's tried it. I am hoping that my analogy is more imperfect than that. ;) Requiring people to hand out an assist quota to anyone that helps them, I hope, might be closer to each player rewarding assists to anyone else who passes them the ball. Since it's all players giving assists for any reason to each other, and not a single ref only handing out assists for the shot, perhaps that will allow for a fuzzier definition of success and a system that is harder to game?

My experience coaching a college sports team for a few years is that even very good players are often pretty bad at assessing the contributions of their teammates. They tend to significantly over-weight the contributions of players who have a similar style of play to themselves, and underweight the contributions of players who play other positions (or play the same position differently).

They especially undervalue actions that happen "away from the play" (the software-engineering equivalent might be something like rewarding a teammate who steps in to help you fix an critical block-ship bug, missing the person who had the foresight to write a test case two years ago that prevents a bug from occurring in the first place).

The NHL at least takes into account not only the person who passed to the player who scored, but sometimes also the person to passed to that person as well.

There's also the guy that won the ball to pass the person who passed to the person who scored.

And also the guy who pressured the opponent into attempting a difficult pass so that his team mate could win the ball in the first place.

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