If you've been around yc for more than a month, you've doubtless seen a number of links to articles on motivation as it pertains to creative activities like software development. The consensus is pretty clear. Incentives hurt productivity in creative activities.
This seems to have something to do with the relationship between creative effort and intrinsic vs. extrinsic motivation. The prospect of an incentive seems to gum up the creative works.
When you compound that with how difficult it is to recognize, let alone find good talent, especially with an interview process, you have a real conundrum.
Real conundrums are rarely solved by naive one-dimensional solutions like "offer more money." An actual solution would have to solve the dual problems of finding good help and not spoiling it with overt incentives.
Clearly there is a real problem here. Perversely, if you could solve it, you could make a lot of money!
You're looking at the problem in the short term. What offering more money can do is increase the prestige of a profession, and increase the number of intelligent people going into the field.
Right now a large majority of very smart, creative people are going into medicine because they want to be challenged and most likely also want the prestige and security of a well paying job. I know more than a few very bright friends who took some CS classes in college and weren't challenged, they ended up going into physics.
Software Engineering should be a high prestige job, to better attract talent to the field, not necessarily to keep your star programmer working for you.
I don't see 1) how I was "rationalizing [my] pay grade," nor 2) what the remark about not taking one's eye off the bottom line has to do with anything.
The idea that the OP put forward was that simply offering more will solve the problem of finding competent programmers. My comment was related to recent and compelling research into motivation in creative work. It seemed related. I'm not sure I mentioned my pay grade.
Having one's eye on the bottom line is different from being subject to an incentive program, and different still from being competent. The latter is the more to the point. Anyone can be greedy. Even the incompetent. In fact, due to the Dunning-Kruger effect, it might even be suspected that the incompetent are likely to feel more entitled to a higher wage than the competent.
I am not your buddy. However, I will offer the following friendly advice: You might enjoy the level of discourse on Reddit or Digg more than that on YC.
I don't think that's necessarily the case. If you're looking for very talented programming, chances are they'll already have a somewhat decent job. To pull them from that job to yours, you'll have to offer at least as much as they're already making. Sure, 60,000 USD a year may be plenty, but someone making 65k will probably immediately subconsciously ignore the ad (unless of course they're very displeased with their current job and desperate for another, which probably is also rare for very talented programmers).
Well, you'll have to offer them equivalent worth to what they're making. I left a high-paying job at a company that didn't appreciate its geeks to go to a lower-paying job whose entire staff (except for three project managers and the accountant) were geeks. The founder started the company doing websites in Perl in the 90's, and grew it into a small-scale hosting/app dev company. It's still private, it's still owned by the two original partners, and they still work their asses off every day at the company. The result is an environment that is not only geek-friendly, but geek-run.
Did I miss the large paycheques? Sure. Did I miss the stress? Or people breathing down my neck for results, a week after they said they'd get me the information I needed but never did? Or being denied my vacation pay because my previous management-approved sick days (most of which I spent working from home) were suddenly 'excessive'? I didn't miss that at all.
It isn't about offering people a better salary, it's about offering people a better package. If you only offer $60k to someone who's making $70k, but give them 4 weeks paid vacation, let them work from home three days a week, and let them expense their cellphone data plans and home internet, they'll be more interested.
Especially once you interview someone, you can sometimes figure out what kind of perks will most appeal to them. Mac fanboy? Offer to buy them a new iPhone on launch day every time one is released. You've just gone from $60k to $60.7k, but the employee is going to appreciate it a lot more, since he'll never have to budget for it again.
Does he like to travel? Offer up extra paid vacation, and then add to that $3000 of 'travel expenses' per year, for personal use. That's usually enough to fly two people anywhere in the world, return, so he and his girlfriend can take a nice long trip to Europe after you ship version 1.05 and everyone's ready to unwind. The idea that he won't have to budget for it - that he can just suddenly decide to go to Laos or Mumbai or Morocco, even if his bank account is on empty - will be appealing. It's like a 'get out of town free' card.
Tell all your employees you'll pay an accountant to do their taxes for them. It's a huge hassle for most people, and if you take that away tax season gets far less stressful.
So many programming jobs I've seen offer high salaries, but with minimal benefits. You get a stock health package, minimal vacation, and MAYBE you get to expense PART of your phone bill, if you're an admin on call. Take away all the junk that people don't want to worry about and let them focus on being geeks.
It's hard to offer this sort of thing in a job posting, but if you can lure the good people in to an interview, this is how you get them on board.
Exactly. Perks are a method of control really, to make the employee dependent on the company for their lifestyle, knowing it will be hard to negotiate their salary up to an equivalent level at another company. Reminds me of one company some friends of mine worked for, fantastic perks (like the entire company being flown to NYC for a movie premiere) but the salaries were awful, none of them could have afforded that trip themselves.
My attitude is, look, I have friends, I have a life, I have things I want to do, I don't need the company to fill in these gaps. The only "rewards" I want are cash and time to spend it.
Um, does your cash lower your tax burden? You should look at your marginal tax rate. I'm personally pushing 40% marginally, which means that any "perks" that the company can offer me which don't show up on my final W-2 are worth almost twice as much as if I'd had to pay for them out of pocket. Once you reach a certain salary level, you're wasting money not negotiating down your salary for things you value more.
In your experience, is it actually as easy to get unpaid time off as you make it sound? Certainly, not being paid for not working is entirely possible, but it's much less desirable if you lose your job for it...
(My job allows you to "buy" extra time off, so it's not an issue for me; but I figured this was uncommon, especially in the States.)
If I make it sound as easy as taking paid vacation, then yes, but with a small sample size.
The much larger sample size I have for a related question: is it any easier to take vacation at a company which offers 3 weeks instead of 2 weeks annually? To this, I've found the answer is "no."
Both situations have a simple explanation, which is that, except for the smallest companies, the person(s) setting the PTO policy is not the same as the one approving absences. That is, my manager cares about my availability, whereas HR and/or Accounting cares about how much I get paid during such absences.
This just begs the question, though. If you assume that talent chases money and nothing else, then it follows that talent chases money and nothing else.
Particularly your second point about developers ignoring jobs salaried at less than their current pay. Working in a toxic environment, or doing meaningless work, or staying where one's range of expression is limited, all have a cost. You won't know until you get there, but when you do, you will.
"Incentives hurt productivity in creative activities."
Unadulterated nonsense. On the one hand, I recall a cartoon-drawing presentation about school contests and the like. On the other hand, there are these centuries and centuries of evidence that PEOPLE RESPOND TO INCENTIVES, PERIOD.
If you think that a company couldn't assemble a team of OUTSTANDING programmers by offering each $200k a year, you're crazy or stupid or both.
"If you think that a company couldn't assemble a team of OUTSTANDING programmers by offering each $200k a year, you're crazy or stupid or both"
This is simplistic and naive. Money isn't what motivates most programmers. I know this may be hard to understand for many people on HN, but it's true. Many of the best programmers I know are passionate about a specific area or two. Imagine going up to one of the jruby developers and saying "Hey, I think you should stop working on jruby and make an asp.net site with me and I'll pay you $200k". They're polite so they probably wouldn't laugh on the outside.
The second major problem is the assumption that offering a lot of money will some how magically make it easy to identify good talent. It won't.
The third problem is that most good programmers aren't looking for work. Offering more money won't make a difference because they'll never know anyway.
Centuries and centuries of evidence that people respond to incentives is based on prescriptive work. The studies that Dan Pink is referring to concern the more recent advent of creative and cognitive work does not have centuries and centuries of evidence for money as a motivator. That's why it's being studied, and that's partly why the results of the studies are so intriguing.
It's interesting that your gut reaction is that this is all nonsense, and that you dismiss a single presentation as being nonsense purely on your own feelings and reactions. The book that Dan Pink wrote, and the work being done in the field is at odds with your reaction.
I know I won't convince you, and I know that you'll simply dismiss me as crazy, or stupid, or both, but the programmers who work for me often took a pay cut to do so. And they've stayed.
My recent complaints haven't been about being able to find good programmers, they've been about incompetent programmers who claim they're great, and in all probability honestly believe it.
If you're solving any problem at all, it's the wrong one. I don't want more job applicants, I just want applications from better candidates. My experience, and the studies I've read, say that offering more money won't help. I hope you understand that I'll put more stock in them than in your naked and unsupported assertions.
Anyone clever enough to be worth $200K a year in salary will also know that anyone paying £200K a year probably has some very particular expectations - i.e. they have a ROI in mind.
People who are really good tend to have their own ideas of what platforms they want to work on and what kind of problems they find interesting. Anyone paying $200K a year probably doesn't expect to give much leeway.
Note: I know people who get paid that much, I wouldn't want their jobs. I've been approached for positions paying roughly that amount and said "no" purely on the description of the working conditions.
I've read the studies you mention and I think you misunderstand the point being made. If you incentivize work such that "Bonus X is dependent on doing Y", you get worse quality creative work. If you pay a person ahead of time such that they don't have to think about any rewards while they're working, they perform better creative work. Offering a higher salary would more likely be the proper motivation for creative work.
Paying more money takes it out of the equation and let you fine tune the other incentives. Companies that can get great creative work out of people pay them such that money is not an issue.
To cut through some of the BS around this:
A salary that's sufficient and feels fair is essential for letting your talented coder check off that box and get on with life.
At the most basic level, if your developers aren't earning enough money to easily solve the myriad money-related problems of everyday life, those stresses will seriously affect their work. Money doesn't buy happiness, but lack of money can sure make it hard to find.
The pay also needs to be high enough that your developers don't feel worried that they're being ripped off -- that is, if they notice they you pay below the industry standard for the region, but they know their work is above average (in fact it may be way above average), they'll be forced to dedicate time to figure out if they're being taken advantage of. Not because they need the money, but because we all tend to think people who get tricked out of their money are fools, and they don't want to be seen as fools.
Once you get those two things out of the way, then you can focus on building real, non-monetary incentives for creative work -- interesting and diverse projects, sense of purpose, constant learning without forced massive leaps (good flow), allowing & encouraging mastery, etc..
It's absolutely true that just raising the money won't fix hiring problems once it's "high enough", but if you're simply paying too low, you don't have a chance.
> The consensus is pretty clear. Incentives hurt productivity in creative activities.
I get the impression that the mechanism for that is that anxiety about getting/losing the incentives can starve the creative processing of mental CPU time and maybe lower your risk tolerance below the optimum. A flat salary shouldn't trigger that regardless of how high it is, and conversely a poor environment (antagonistic management, mandatory overtime if you're not meeting some almost-reasonable deadline, ...) ought to be able to trigger it even if money isn't involved at all.
Actually, all the studies talk about incentives in the sense of "additional compensation that is conditional upon performance" not base pay. Here's why more money works: not everyone has the same expenses. Some of the best are married with kids. I don't like to spend time away from my kids or my wife, but knowing that when I take two weeks off its to go visit the wife's family that I'm paying to fly to Hawaii makes my life, and hers, that bit more bearable when she hasn't seen me for days.
Yes, a low salary will get you some young qualified programmers, or some older ones with no life. But you will increase your hiring pool by offering more money.
No, it doesn't solve the problem of how to tell the good ones from the shit ones, but it does increase the total number of good ones available.
This seems to have something to do with the relationship between creative effort and intrinsic vs. extrinsic motivation. The prospect of an incentive seems to gum up the creative works.
When you compound that with how difficult it is to recognize, let alone find good talent, especially with an interview process, you have a real conundrum.
Real conundrums are rarely solved by naive one-dimensional solutions like "offer more money." An actual solution would have to solve the dual problems of finding good help and not spoiling it with overt incentives.
Clearly there is a real problem here. Perversely, if you could solve it, you could make a lot of money!