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Open Source vs. Wall Street Bonuses
tcd004 sends in a piece from PBS NewsHour on money and what actually motivates people. "What best motivates the workforce? More money? Fame? New studies reveal that beyond a certain threshold, large financial rewards can actually become a drag on performance in the workplace. Reporter Paul Solman compares million-dollar Wall Street bonuses to the rewards earned by the labor force behind the open source community."
Well, I did the sacrilegious thing, I read TFA :( Sorry.
So that's not what the thesis is. The thesis is that by offering to receive a very large reward as opposed to offering to receive a small reward without paying attention to the time, the people were driven to enter this mode of behavior, where they stopped thinking creatively and tried to solve the problem by brute force, without any regard the real question at hand. People who were offered large reward if they solved the problem quicker, actually did worse (took more time and did not come up with the optimal solution) on average than those, who were offered a small reward and where time did not matter (they saved about a third of time it looks like and came up with the optimal solution that corresponded to the actual requirements correctly.)
So what TFA is saying is that offering a lot of money quickly prevents people from actually doing a good job quickly and that they take on average more time then to do a worse job. It's like TFA is saying that people enter some sort of a panic mode and cannot think straight because of the money involved.
You can't handle the truth.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perverse_incentive
This looks like a good opportunity to recommend The Mythical Man-Month . It talks about software written forty years ago, but its lessons are still plenty applicable today :)
Reality check indeed. IT is an expense and doesn't bring in any revenue. That's exactly how upper management sees IT. Also, it's "aisle", not "isle".