

How can you inspire programmers to work longer work weeks voluntarily? - danso
http://www.quora.com/How-can-you-inspire-programmers-to-work-longer-work-weeks-voluntarily?share=1

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flipped_bit
A slightly long winded way of addressing this dead-horse of an issue, so that
even clueless managers and leaderless dimwits can understand why this idiotic
concern keeps cropping p all the time:

When you look at the history of technology, it is always removing humans out
of the system that leads to higher productivity - machines taking over in
agriculture, assembly line + robotics, automation in textiles etc..

About the only thing not done yet is to replace humans in programming itself -
maybe it can take a similar path as it was done in language translation; use
statistical techniques on huge corpus of human-written code snippets (tagged
via domain areas), and spit out solutions even if it is only approximate upto
a certain confidence interval. The remaining details can be filled in by
humans (and you may not need many of them). Of couse IDEs' do this somewhat
with auto-code generation at a very minimalist sense right now.

Maybe it needs to be combined with self-correcting programs that evolves and
adapts to new conditions. Yeah all vague but we may be moving in this
direction - hardware itself is getting more 'soft', so the graying of the
boundaries between h/w and s/w is possibly another direction we are heading
towards, and may converge with the AI driven model.

Till that happens, it is the managements job to motivate humans as it is done
for ages - with carrots and sticks. As you see with apes, sometimes we all
have to groom each other, eat the lice, kiss here and there, rub the genitals
and be co-operative.

You can also try to be 'inspiring' (most humans are suckers for hero-worship,
and prone to worship false idols), and generally with a more intelligent
bunch, it is more effective by 'leading by example'. You want your team to
work hard, prove that you can be with them in the trenches, and do the same.

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lumelet
lets them work on stuff that excites them.

if that is not possible, then hire folks who are excited.

if not possible, pay them more (money, benefits, office recreation etc.. ).

if that doesn't work, then remove 'voluntarily' from the question

~~~
ReshNesh
Or at least let them work using new and exciting technologies which they might
want to learn (if suitable for the project). But still, I think more money
will work better.

