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Notes and References for "The Importance of Being Average"
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Average.md

Slide 1 How to be Awesome

  • DevOpsDaysDC 2015 -- I've not looked up this talk/speaker, because I'm not critiquiing a colleague's earnest attempt to share his best practices. I just used that title as jumping off point.
  • Above Average Fallacy: Most of cognitive biases I reference are discussed in Kahneman, Daniel. Thinking, fast and slow. Macmillan, 2011.

Slide 2 How to be Average

Slide 3 The Importance of Being Average

  • "Hueristic" -- Kahneman 98.

Slide 7 Relative to your colleagues

I didn't delver into the research on how people view their workplace status and salary relative to their colleagues. Some interesting work:

  • D. Card, A Mas, E Moretti, and E. Saez. Inequality at Work: The effect of peer salaries on job satisfaction. American Economic Review, 102:2981-3003, 2012.
  • Buntrock, Evan N. "Rank and Job Search: Information or Irritation?." (2014).
  • Brown, Gordon DA, et al. "Does Wage Rank Affect Employees’ Well‐being?." Industrial Relations: A Journal of Economy and Society 47.3 (2008): 355-389.

In short, dissatisfaction with being underpaid is greater than the satisfaction of being highly paid, a nice "Loss Aversion" effect.

I did mention "Big-Fish-Little-Pond Effect" which is based on the work of Herbert Marsh and John Parker from 1984. They described the big-fish–little-pond effect, "whereby equally able students have lower academic self-concepts in high-ability schools than in low-ability schools." Longitudinal analysis showed, in turn, that higher academic self-concept had a direct effect on later academic performance. This has been a robust observatation across various cultures

I argue that it takes a level of maturity to move past the BFLPE, and put yourself in a position of being average with respect to a reference peer group, to continue your professional growth. This is an opinion that doesn't seem to have support one way or another from my foray into the literature.

  • Herbert W. Marsh; J W. Parker. Determinants of student self-concept: Is it better to be a relatively large fish in a small pond even if you don't learn to swim as well? Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Vol 47(1), Jul 1984, 213-23
  • H W Marsh and K T Hau. Big-fish-little-pond effect on academic self-concept. A cross-cultural (26-country) test of the negative effects of academically selective schools. Am Psychol. 2003 May;58(5):364-76.
  • H. Marsh. The big-fish-little-pond effect on academic self-concept. Journal of Educational Psychology, Vol 79(3), Sep 1987, 280-295.

I reached out to several academics hoping that they could provide some clarity on the whole question of status vs. satisfaction vs. wages, and not surprisingly, they shed light on what proved to be an interesting landscape, although one without the clear landmarks I'd hoped for. I'm very indebted to Gordon A. Brown of Warwick University and Evan Buntrock, Amazon, for their time.

Slide 9 Relative to DevOps

Damon Edwards and John Willis coined CAMS in 2010, to which Jez Humble added an L later, to stand for:

  • Culture
  • Automation
  • Lean
  • Measurement
  • Sharing

http://itrevolution.com/devops-culture-part-1/

Slide 11 Relative to human physical limits

  • Danziger, Shai, Jonathan Levav, and Liora Avnaim-Pesso. "Extraneous factors in judicial decisions." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 108.17 (2011): 6889-6892.

** Slide 14** Relative to other leaders

Hudson Employment Index, 2006: https://web.archive.org/web/20061031061224/http://www.hudson-index.com/node.asp?SID=7248

From https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB115922723166973676:

While 92% of managers say they are doing an "excellent" or "good" job managing employees, only 67% of workers agree. An additional 23% say their boss is doing a "fair" job, and 10% find their manager is doing a "poor" job, according to a survey of 1,854 U.S. workers by Rasmussen Reports LLC for Hudson, the staffing and outsourcing firm

https://books.google.com/books?id=J69aU3XZS38C&pg=PT39&lpg=PT39&dq=90%25+managers+rate+themselves+above+average?&source=bl&ots=vE64Fzjupv&sig=FWP0ZRF1WRpgIrI6WngVJypjNFw&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjTzove7LzSAhVH2yYKHc6zCRcQ6AEITjAJ#v=onepage&q=90%25%20managers%20rate%20themselves%20above%20average%3F&f=false

90% of business managers rate their performance as superior to their peers (French 1968)

** Slide 17** Relative to your populace

Slide 19 Don't fight stupid

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