
Price's Law: Why Only a Few People Generate Half of the Results - jxub
https://dariusforoux.com/prices-law/
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KKKKkkkk1
Doing the work is one thing, assigning credit is another. The phenomenon that
some people are 10x at doing the work exists but is rare. It is much more
common that people are 10x at getting the credit.

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tonyedgecombe
Yes, although a sales role is quite easy to measure objectively.

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maxxxxx
Maybe but sales is also a team effort. The best sales person will fail if
he/she isn't backed by a big support system.

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tonyedgecombe
Presumably everybody benefits from that team though.

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rqs
Presumably everybody also benefits from the thing they've made for sell. So...

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drostie
I liked the intriguing idea of how this article started but it did end on a
cop-out, “now that I have suggested this phenomenon rather than understanding
what causes it so that we can harness it in practice, I invite you (what must
necessarily be the majority of my readership if the pattern holds true) to
quit your jobs!”

It would be very interesting to work out a probability distribution f(r), 0 <
r < ∞ support, such that when sampled N times independently half of the total
sum is contained in the top √N terms. Like I would suspect it can be done with
long-tailed distributions, though they might need to have an undefined
cumulant or so... just that trying to set up that “sum of the top √N” integral
sounds very tricky in a way that would foster some clever insight.

But of course the more likely explanation would probably have something to do
with network effects. If you imagine that each person is a morphism (or a
bounded number of morphisms?) in a category for example, perhaps whose objects
are indirectly profit centers, then having N profit centers correlates to
having N objects that your company relates, which correlates to N^2 employees
connecting them together, so if the top 50% of profit resides in some fixed
number of these objects, then only the ~N employees out of the ~N^2 who happen
to deal with these “cash cows” would make up half of the profit. To detect
this you would want to show that rather than linearly scaling with employees,
the returns to scale might show a characteristic pattern of profit versus
company size.

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mhneu
I suspect a big cause of nonlinear productivity effects like this is the
experience and skills required to do the job.

In the example cited, sales, the best salespeople have long-built networks of
personal connections. That allows them to bring in deals that new people can’t
access. It’s very different than retail work where it’s hard to greatly
outperform your peers and little training is needed.

So agree models like this can be created but my feeling is the key aspects of
the model relate to experience (related to your cash cow) rather than scale.
At least for creative jobs.

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roma1n
That's been debunked by examples where hiring (literal) team players that are
not shining on their own enhances a team above the level of an 'all-star'
team. So why do we keep repeating this nonsense?

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wpietri
It'd guess it's because a) it lets us all think we are in the "rockstar"
category, which is pleasing, and b) it lets us avoid all sorts of difficult
thinking about the system that actually produces the work, and c) justifies
unequal rewards, which is entirely useful to the people receiving the rewards.

It's the same reason the myth of the 10x engineer is so popular. I've worked
with some people who certainly thought they were the 10x engineer. As far as I
could tell, they were just showboats who did highly visible work, leaving
little things like technical debt for others. Or the "brilliant" engineer who
make things that require high cognitive load to understand, instead of doing
the extra work to make them clear. [1] Or who shirk the work of supporting
colleagues and building strong teams.

So basically I think these are the people who optimize for the visible success
metric, not the ones creating the most value.

[1] Just this week a friend took over responsibility for an internal build
system. The previous author had written it in JavaScript. Except that he was
really excited about functional languages, so he wrote it in a highly
functional style incomprehensible to anybody not used to it. Now this either
needs to be mostly rewritten or anybody who wants to work on the build system
needs to spend 6 months learning Haskell first. I'm sure this guy looked
productive and got to sound brilliant in meetings, but a better productivity
analysis would include the significant costs he imposed on others.

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majewsky
> It's the same reason the myth of the 10x engineer is so popular.

I understood why people believe the "10x engineer" stories after meeting 0.1x
engineers.

(And I don't mean juniors. I mean highly-paid consultants.)

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maxxxxx
This sounds more like a few people getting credit for the work of many people
that work in the background.

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wwweston
It's probably worth noting that "credit" rather than work is _explicitly_ the
relevant concept in play in the formation of Price's Law -- Price seems to
have conceived the relationship in the context of looking at academic
citations.

"Work done" is certainly one component of having a much-cited paper; you are
simply not going to have a relatively large number of cited papers if you have
not written a relatively large number of papers. But there's the question of
what other factors lead papers to awareness, recognition of value, and
citation, and those questions likely don't have a linear relationship with
"value created."

Given the description of some of the dynamics involved as a "preferential
attachment process" involving "cumulative advantage"
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preferential_attachment](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preferential_attachment)
), Price seems to have recognized this and probably had a different conception
than the author of the piece we're discussing.

(Peterson, who the author indicates brought Price's law to his attention,
seems to recognize this as well, and sometimes suggests that it's best to
assume that people who aren't at the top of some Pareto distribution "P" in
contributing value are probably contributing value in some other way that
isn't visible to people focusing on P. )

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madhadron
There's a basic problem with this:

Price's law doesn't fit the data. (DOI 10.1016/0306-4573(88)90049-0)

It certainly shouldn't be randomly reapplied to things besides scientific
publication. Even within scientific publication, the uneven distribution of
publications is a result of far more complicated mechanisms than some simple
measure of results. Remember, by bibliometric methods, Newton, Feynman, and
Perelman are some of the lowest performers ever to work in science.

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ouid
Price's Law doesn't say what the author of this article seems to think.

The marginal utility of hiring additional workers in an organization is
smaller for each additional employee. This is both obvious, and completely
accounts for the effect on its own.

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droidist2
Oh, kind of like the Mythical Man Month, except there the marginal utility at
some point becomes negative for each additional employee assigned to a
project.

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petermcneeley
These type of results are a consequence of game theory. Given that, I dont
know what a popular psychology professor is doing speaking on this subject.

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rdlecler1
Taking the idea that the output is the square root of the number of
participants, suggests that three companies of 10 people (3 * sqrt(10) ~= 10)
do the same work as one company of 100 people (1 * sqrt(100) = 10). Not
unreasonable but it does suggest optimal organizational sizes and the
emergence of modular design.

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uxhack
A company of 10 will produce an output of 6 if 3 people produce 50% of the
work. A company of 100 will produce the output of 20 if 10 people do 50% of
the production. So a company of 100 will produce 3 times more than a company
of 10.

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myth_drannon
Hire more people for the law to work.

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fanzhang
Probably depends on the domain. I really don't see it for carrying bricks, but
I can totally see it for abstract math research.

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mhneu
No no, don’t believe Jordan Peterson (main cite in this article). He’s a media
troll who takes controversial views on purpose and is at the fringes of
psychology.
[https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.washingtonpost.com/amphtml/...](https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.washingtonpost.com/amphtml/opinions/the-
profound-sadness-in-jordan-petersons-antidote-to-
chaos/2018/05/09/8e1be3a4-53bd-11e8-9c91-7dab596e8252_story.html)

One of Peterson’s main arguments is about college campuses and politics. But
85% of HARD scientists - who have nothing to do with politics - are liberals
(2015 AAAS poll). That argues that smart people like those at universities see
through right wing propaganda - they’ve read Orwell and Arendt and Altemeyer
and John Dean and “Manufacturing Consent” and understand how propaganda works.

Peterson is toxic and definitely not an intellectual model.

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noobiemcfoob
You're holding up a liberal rag as evidence that Peterson (a vocal
conservative) is a troll. He's not a troll so much as someone on the wrong end
of identity politics. Sam Harris and others wouldn't associate with him if
your claims were true.

Working with that 85% of "HARD scientists", yeah, they're mostly pretty
liberal, but they're just as likely to spout off horrible conspiracy theories
and assume all conservatives are backwater inbreds as anyone else. That bias
is supremely real, and it's not because scientists have a magical, rational
filter against propaganda.

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mhneu
I suggest reading Mann and Ornstein on the intellectual foundations behind
modern US conservativism. They are both historians of politics and 20 years
ago were considered supremely centrist and above the fray. What they say about
(American) conservatism is sobering.

Another good source is Josh Greene’s book on Bannon. That book describes how
Bannon used GOP billionaire money (Mercer) to intentionally try to radicalize
young tech-savvy men for the conservative cause. Bannon realized (and Prager
around the same time) that with some propaganda he could persuade young
mostly-white men to vote for the pro-billionaire agenda of the Republicans.

I won’t say more here to avoid getting into politics on HN. But check out
those sources for more info.

—-

On the the square root phenomenon, I wonder whether this arises due to the
experience required to be very productive at creative work. Factory workers
have little ability to be twice as productive as their peers. But the best
salespeople and programmers can easily be many times as productive as at the
entry-level. There’s a nonlinear function of experience and skills.

I bet one could build some automata/stat mech type models of this. (And it’s
not even clear you need to care about interactions). See if nonlinearities in
productivity as a function of experience (and as importantly, luck- and maybe
talent) hold in soft fields and creative fields.

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smrk007
So by my understanding, if only one person is doing the work, the square root
of one is one, meaning they are only doing 50% of the work... Who does the
other 50%?!

