hah!

February 10, 2005 10:02 AM

Fun with statistics. Why the PHB is a mathematical certainty.
posted by delmoi (11 comments total)

Fabulous.
posted by srt19170 at 10:15 AM on February 10, 2005

I'm no statistician, but isn't that sort of an aberration?
posted by Hildago at 10:17 AM on February 10, 2005

Yeah, but try calling your boss an aberration to his face and see how much he likes it.
posted by nebulawindphone at 10:30 AM on February 10, 2005

Now try doing a PHB statistic for Military service. That one gets frightening.
posted by mystyk at 10:35 AM on February 10, 2005

So, the more common your job, the less intelligent you are?
posted by Simon! at 10:36 AM on February 10, 2005

Without a doubt, the best of the web. Thanks.
posted by nofundy at 10:37 AM on February 10, 2005

"Dilbert" is still around? Is it funny now?
posted by Mayor Curley at 10:38 AM on February 10, 2005

So, the more common your job, the less intelligent you are?

Well, that's his implication, not mine. It's hard to imagine someone with passion for what they do being a general manager, though.
posted by delmoi at 10:55 AM on February 10, 2005

Having spent over twenty years in Cubetown in various industries, I am quite familiar with the PHB. I even understand why there are so many of them. What I have never, ever understood is why American industry pays them so well. We can all complain about them being clueless, but they are certainly good, individually and as a group, in setting their own pay rate.

If that dot was $20k left, that'd be appropriate. IMHO.
posted by Mur at 11:06 AM on February 10, 2005

I hate to piss on the My Boss Is So Stupid Parade, but General and Operations Managers are top executives, not middle managers.

General and operations managers plan, direct, or coordinate the operations of companies or public and private sector organizations...In some organizations, the duties of general and operations managers may overlap the duties of chief executive officers.
posted by Cassford at 11:45 AM on February 10, 2005

Cassford: excellent point

Also, I think if you delved into the data just for this job, you'd find a chi-squared distribution. In other words, lots of data points piled into the lower part of the range, but a few very high salaries (e.g., Big Megacorp's General Manager) that pull out the average. My bet is that other jobs (e.g., assembly line worker) tend to have a normal (bell) distribution, and thus don't appear as outliers on this graph. This scatter plot would probably look a lot different if it were plotting medians and not means. Either way, the graph does nothing to describe whether this job is overpaid, just that there are lots of people with it and the average is high.

Not to get all statistical on you, but hey, that's what this thread's about, eh?
posted by mcstayinskool at 1:21 PM on February 10, 2005