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Comment by wpietri | Hacker News Reader

You do not in fact need that. It can work, of course. Financial traders and salespeople, for example, often work in situations with strong extrinsic motivation.

But I've spent years in both startup and non-profit contexts, and I think intrinsic motivation is much more powerful, especially for work that requires creativity. The best people I've worked with, even in startup contexts, weren't focused on the money. They liked making things and solving problems.

And I don't think it's just my experience. McConnell's Rapid Development has data from surveys of developers; they were much more motivated by things like responsibility and challenge than they were by cash.

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Thats great for them - but I'm an extrinsically motivated person and so are many others

I don't think there are fixed categories of people for this. I've never met a child who wasn't intrinsically motivated to do creative work. E.g., I think of the many hours I spent lost in drawing and making ascii art.

I think it's mainly a matter of training. People who want us to do things for them train us in responding to extrinsic motivation. That's not terrible; some amount of it makes the economy work, after all. But for me one of the essential characteristics of adulthood is deciding how to train ourselves. If you want, you can reconnect with your intrinsic motivations.

Then go work in sales or another extrinsically motivated profession

Exactly. I'm hiring right now for 3 developer jobs at a mission-driven organization. I user-tested the job posting and found that mission-driven people loved it and more mercenary people were put off by it. Which is exactly the effect I wanted. If you have smart people aligned on the same mission, you get higher productivity with much lower managerial effort.

I don't think it's impossible for cash-maximizers to be good developers, but I do think it's hard. A lot of software is essentially a long-term investment, so the short-term thinking of people hustling for a buck works against it. More than once I've had to clean up code bases put together by contractors who were clearly in it for the money and it showed in their work. There might be some theoretical way to bridge the long-term needs via a complicated short-term incentive structure, but I doubt it. It's too prone to things like the "code me a new minivan" problem: https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/488178/what-does...

That sounds awesome and I couldn't agree more.

Don't get me wrong, I am in it for the money in the sense that I need a proper salary but I couldn't care less about a 'bonus' being dangled in front of me and putting metrics in place that I'm supposed to hit to get a larger or smaller raise and percentage of the measly bonus (and no, making the bonus larger doesn't make it better. Makes it worse).

I do my best every day just because I enjoy my job. I won't try to do it better because of some metric someone is judging me on. I might actually do a worse job if I find my employer trying to use these metrics to deny me proper raises. Worse in the sense that you will probably see the metric reached. Actual output or overall results for the company will suffer.

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