After speaking with Mark Turansky about the original Performance v. Effort post and he gave his impression that my post is confusing because it delivers arbitrary numbers with no explanation of how I arrive at those numbers or what they mean.
Ultimately the post is saying this:
You can’t expect to hire based upon an industry or market standard and end up with a solid company. You must understand your needs (weights) and the abilities (ranks) of candidates in order to find individuals who are a proper fit for your company at any given time.
The numbers are arbitrary because they are used to illustrate a theoretical situation. The rankings and weights assigned to each individual are fictional numbers that are at the discretion of each theoretical company to arrive at. In this case I have illustrated a scenario where Company A places the most value on productivity, sociability, then effort while Company B values fall in the order of sociability, effort, then productivity. These numbers could just as easily fall in any other number of combinations and, in a real world situation, would involve far more parameters than the three listed here. Likewise, the weights are indicative of a simplistic scenario where everyone in the company who’s opinion counts feels the same way. In a situation where there are conflicting views on weights the scenario would be far too complex to model easily. Once again, the weights used were arbitrary and illustrative in nature.
This confusion, I think, arises from my neglect to include an obligatory reference to ceteris paribus. The concept that this is a limited scenario with a very focused view should be qualified and my original post was truly intended to work on a finite and unchanging model. Without focusing on a situation qualified by ceteris paribus you would find yourself in a situation much too complex to illustrate easily.
