
The Vast and Endless Sea - alexandros
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2010/06/the-vast-and-endless-sea.html
======
mmt
The 10-minute talk at the end mentioned a prerequisite, almost as an aside, to
the learning on motivation: pay people enough to take the issue of money off
the table.

My experience is that it is the very rare company, even among startups, that
thinks of compensation in this way or otherwise meets the prereq. It explains
the somewhat extreme sentiment I've seen here on HN of "screw you. pay me." on
the topic of motivation and engagement.

When what I do[1] can easily save twice my salary, as a side effect, it's
surreal to be negotiating an extra 10%. These days, I just quote an acceptable
salary range when asked, despite the negotiating disadvantage. More often than
not, it succeeds in filtering out wastes of my time.

To some degree, perhaps not fully consciously, it's also been a test. Assuming
the initial need filter is passed, how hard my reasonable asking price is
pushed back on is a measure of how much my contribution will be valued.

[1] Assuming I'm actually needed, and not just wanted, perhaps as overkill.

~~~
dpritchett
Thanks for pointing this out. I found a related post on Pink's blog:
<http://www.danpink.com/archives/2010/01/raises-do-matter>

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petercooper
_I don't care how much you pay me, you'll never be able to recreate the
incredibly satisfying feeling I get when demonstrating mastery within my
community of peers._

On SO people's desire to "demonstrate mastery" can often turn into "make
people think I'm awesome at any cost". I have ~500 points, so am not a _total_
SO rookie, but quickly stopped answering any questions because you can be
guaranteed someone with a worse answer will get voted up if they get it in
first and make it _sound_ authoritative.

Admittedly, this seems to have gotten better in the last few months from the
threads I've seen, but early on I made a laundry list of totally erroneous
"best answers" and it was just depressing.

Writing awesome content on your _own_ site and getting links from Reddit,
Hacker News, and the like is far more rewarding in the end than plumping up
someone else's content site, if you have the faculties, time and resources to
do so.

~~~
mshafrir
One thing they've done to reduce the "fastest gun" problem is disable
accepting an answer within a certain time frame after a question is posted.
Also, answers with the same vote count are randomly displayed rather than
ordered by order of posting.

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DrSprout
What really turns me off to StackOverflow is how much the ads flow into the
content and are really difficult to ignore. I know that they've got a user-
base that needs some extra coaxing to look at ads, but it really diminishes
the site's utility, and fundamentally I think this sort of thing should be an
open repository of knowledge like Wikipedia.

~~~
rnicholson
Could something as niche as StackOverflow be supported through a donation
system like Wikipedia?

~~~
DrSprout
I don't necessarily have anything against ads, but less obtrusive ones would
be nice, and more importantly the core data should be free.

I don't see why something closer to Reddit (but with a slightly more evolved
interface) couldn't function as a non-profit in StackOverflow's place.

~~~
gecko
The core data _is_ free, both through the API, and through the data dumps that
happen every several months.

