Coding Horror: How to Motivate Programmers
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Coding Horror: How to Motivate Programmers
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Re: Coding Horror: How to Motivate Programmers
#2Uhh. No.
One of my best CS professors used to say: "Competition is for horses"
The _right_ way to motivate your hackers is to give them interesting stuff to do so that you can watch as they fall in love with the stuff they're doing and achieve inhuman-seeming goals fueled by caffeine and pure joy for their work.
Not some stupid motivational analogy from "a quality control manager in a hospital".
Re: Coding Horror: How to Motivate Programmers
#3Well, it all depends. I would agree with the main premise - that a little friendly competition is motivational, but the operative words are - wait, that didn't come out right - "a little", and "friendly competition".
I trust my code to be optimal, or I know where it isn't and leave it at that, since I don't feel like / have time to tune it. If somebody fixes it I'm always interested to know how he did it in the former case, and I'm simply grateful in the latter case. And if I rewrite someone else's code for the better, I do feel good - not because I "beat" him, but because the code is better now. And isn't such a stepwise refinement a worthy goal?
Re: Coding Horror: How to Motivate Programmers
#4"Nothing motivates like having another programmer tell you they're rewriting your code because it sucks."
Wrong. This doesn't motivate. It just pisses me off.
Re: Coding Horror: How to Motivate Programmers
#5Uhh. No. One of my best CS professors used to say: "Competition is for horses" The _right_ way to motivate your hackers is to give them interesting stuff to do so that you can watch as they fall in love with the stuff they're doing and achieve inhuman-seeming goals fueled by caffeine and pure joy for their work. Not some stupid motivational analogy from "a quality control manager in a hospital".
"...achieve inhuman-seeming goals fueled by caffeine and pure joy for their work..."
Exactly!
There's almost nothing that can motivate me when I'm "done for the day". Not deadlines, budgets, help, dinner, not even money.
OTOH, there's almost nothing that can get me to knock off for the day when I'm "in the zone". Just yesterday, someone spent 5 minutes showing me something that turned out to be the missing link in 3 different places in my app. Six hours later, I looked up and realized that everyone was gone and the lights were out. Six of the most fun hours in a long time. You can't engineer that into your workplace.
Re: Coding Horror: How to Motivate Programmers
#6Somewhat related on the subject of motivation; the phenomenon in forums or mailing lists where a request for information leads to few, succinct answers, yet an inaccurate or inflammatory post on the same subject results in long, detailed, and often very useful refutations.
Re: Coding Horror: How to Motivate Programmers
#7A former boss of mine thought it would be a good motivational strategy to try to create a little "friendly competition", as Dave Thomas puts it, by putting me and my coworker at odds with each other with various petty, fabricated psychodramas in the hopes that we would both try to compete for Daddy's favor. It didn't take long before both of us quit. This might work with sheep and race horses but simplistic algorithms like these have a tendency to not be very reliable when dealing with human beings. There are too many variables, such as, in the case of me and my coworker, going for a drink after work and realizing the design behind the conflicting narratives our boss was telling each of us in the absence of the other. It's probably quite a common strategy for managers but the dishonesty and apparent disrespect of it didn't sit too well with us at the time.
Re: Coding Horror: How to Motivate Programmers
#8It's funny that the comments here are so negative, and yet, in the real world, this effect proves true over and over again. For example, I've noticed that sometimes you'll have a team of developers just collecting a paycheck, and when a new guy comes on who's hypermotivated, the motivation of the entire team increases.
It's just a fact of life that a very large number of people, including developers, often operate at submaximal performance. They aren't leaving poor code simply because they don't have enough time to do everything that need's doing. They're leaving poor code because they're browsing the web, chatting, or thinking about other things.
Also, there's a lot of really boring code that needs writing. Not everyone can work on interesting projects. Boring code can still benefit from being written with care and motivation.
Re: Coding Horror: How to Motivate Programmers
#9The threat of someone rewriting your code might be a good way spawn a good engineering discussion. If the discussion is constructive you might even improve the team and the code. But if micro management and lack of delegation results in frequent rewrite discussions, that will kill motivation for sure.
Re: Coding Horror: How to Motivate Programmers
#10Well, it all depends. I would agree with the main premise - that a little friendly competition is motivational, but the operative words are - wait, that didn't come out right - "a little", and "friendly competition". I trust my code to be optimal, or I know where it isn't and leave it at that, since I don't feel like / have time to tune it. If somebody fixes it I'm always interested to know how he did it in the forme…
> I trust my code to be optimal, or I know where it isn't and leave it at that
That's a pretty remarkable claim, unless you religiously profile all of your code.