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."

Comments

Real world already knows this

[ender06]

Who would've imagined that knowing you'd get a huge bonus anyway would make you work less/not as hard? The rest of us in the real world already know this.

Re:Real world already knows this

[roman_mir]

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.

Re:Real world already knows this

[Rhaban]

As a developer, I see everyday that when someone is asked to do something with a tight deadline, it usually takes more time than if there's no deadline or a large one.

When someone thinks there's no time to perform a task, they try to cut on "useless" parts like planning, modeling... and they try to begin "productive" work right away.

The result is often that a lot of work has to be redone, and the global task ends up taking more time.

people who do less useful work earn more

[azgard]

In fact, people who do less useful work in society do earn more money. The reasons are twofold:

1. If someone is doing it for the money, he is spending his time in finding ways how to make money as opposed to spending time to improve his skill in the particular area. Thus all other being equal he will get more money.

2. You don't have to pay people who have intrinsic motivation to do something as much as you need to pay people for whom the money are the motivation. Sadly, that's economics 101.

Usually, the "intrinsic motivation" (other reason than money) to do something corresponds with what is useful for society, too.

(Note for moderators: I don't know if I am actually being sarcastic or not. It's sort of like Parkinson's law.)

Re:people who do less useful work earn more

[LKM]

Similarly, in my experience, the people who end up in the highest-paying jobs are usually not the most productive or useful workers at a company, but simply the most sociopathic ones. Instead of helping others and improving the system, they optimized for their own success.

More research needed

[rastos1]

New studies reveal that beyond a certain threshold, large financial rewards can actually become a drag on performance in the workplace.

I'm willing to offer myself as a test subject to verify this hypothesis.