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Comment by roenxi | Hacker News Reader

It is called that because one of the most common places it turns up is managers/inspectors doing routine work. Typically if a manager checks in on their report they'll be stuck doing something that takes a lot longer than usual. If an inspector inspects ... I dunno, widgets, then the widget will typically be unusual because of selection biases.

I'd expect that since this is the usual workplace introduction to the economic value of knowing about the bias it got its name there. A lot of confused people trying to work out why their data makes no sense.

The other fun workplace paradox would be if HR ever tries to be data driven, does some metrics over the engineering department and works out that a degree is inversely correlated with any attempted at measure of skill. Fortunately most HR persons are not interested enough in stats to try that approach.

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Could you elaborate more on the inverse correlation between degree and skill? Do you mean that usually people who did not go to university actually went straight to work and had the chance to get more skill as opposed to people with a degree that actually started later?

Simpsons paradox. People without qualifications have to be obviously competent to be hired to do a job. If someone is clueless they probably slipped in because they got certified somehow (like with a degree).

Expect a negative correlation between certification and competence (in the workplace) because the workplace only reliably excludes people who are incompetent and unqualified. So the population sampled is made up of [qualified, competent], [unqualified, competent] and [qualified, incompetent]. And anyone who isn't ready for that will get very confused when they try to work out how much value a degree adds in their pool of programmers. Or any department, really.

That makes sense, but I would expect this paradox to vanish (or at least get weaker) as you go higher in the hierarchy of technical positions (i.e. from junior to lead, to senior, to principal etc.). I would expect the workplace to somehow naturally get rid of the incompetent people, so that after a certain point you're only left with [qualified, competent] and [unqualified, competent]

When a software engineer gets promoted to a senior role, their responsibility changes to impact a broader timescale. It's entirely possible that promotion is the very thing that masks their incompetence.

For example, a junior developer is expected to manage implementation details, while a senior developer is expected to manage business logic. Incompetently designed business logic is noticed later, and can often be blamed on trivial implementation failure.

One of the best ways to get rid of someone is to recommend them highly to an open position somewhere else. Sometimes a higher level position, or management.

See also: The Peter principle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_principle

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