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Nicole Forsgren: preference

30 Jul 2023 Lenny's Podcast How to measure and improve developer productivity | Nicole Forsgren (Microsoft Research, GitHub, Google)

“If I turn this into a sentence, what do they represent?" And then you want to double check because spurious correlation's one of my favorite websites instead of charts.”

— Nicole Forsgren

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Speaker
Nicole Forsgren
Attribution
Verified speaker
Claim type
preference
Recorded
30 Jul 2023
Publisher
Lenny's Podcast

Transcript context

…I'll Zoom in, right. Okay. Now I will say advanced mode. You can start with the same four-box framework and you can say, "What data do we have available? What do we think the relationships are?" But then you have to go back up to words and then say, "For these data points..." And we think that they represent something, and we think this is the relationship between them. "What do they represent? If I turn this into a sentence, what do they represent?" And then you want to double check because spurious correlation's one of my favorite websites instead of charts. So you'll want to go chat with someone, interview, make sure things are actually right. But the challenge is I will see people run every correlation they could think of, but they haven't turned it into a word or a sentence that you can communicate to someone else. They don't do the check, and they don't do that before... one, before running the correlations. And two, if it's there, right. All of our data is so interrelated that we quite often will find spurious correlations. But it can be really helpful just to have that laid out, even if it's just on a post-it, to say, "What are the things I expect to see? What is this actually testing? What relationship do I suspect is there?" Mm-hmm. Amazing. There's actually... I have a newsletter post, a guest post on how to do a correlation analysis and a regression analysis so folks can [inaudible 01:03:36]-…

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