
Tips for Startup Companies - Sam_Odio
http://philip.greenspun.com/business/startup-tips/
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herdrick
Good advice when he sticks to things he knows. Inexplicably he throws in a
'here's a book I read, maybe it's OK' section. Excerpt: "...you need to
[measure] achievement and make that measure available to the worker so that he
or she can motivate himself (for a computer programmer in a software company,
components of this measure might be 'number of bugs fixed, with extra points
for the severe or tricky ones' and 'pages of documentation written...'

Good lord. Read what Joel Spolsky (and everyone else in the world, it seems)
has written about the perfidity of measuring the "output" of knowledge workers
with punchcard goals, not to mention the effect on morale of 'motivating' your
workers like you would motivate a lab rat. Here's more: "...people don't do
what you tell them to do; they do what gets them a reward."

There's even a Dilbert strip on the subject. Yikes.

