4 ms·
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 "
by CodeyWhizzBang 5mo ago
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.
- sva_ 5mo ago> Half of people will be below average. s/average/median
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- jagged-chisel 5mo agoI 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.
- wongarsu 5mo agoThe 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
- programjames 5mo agoIt is almost never true. If you filter people you're going to get a Pareto distribution.
- skeeter2020 5mo agothere 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.
- paulddraper 5mo agoMedian is a type of average. Though usually "average" implies arithmetic mean.