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Comment by einarvollset | Hacker News Reader

In my recent ploy to get downvoted, I'll sum up my view of this: Fuck you, pay me.

In my recent ploy to get you upvoted, I'll point out that some of the most brilliant programmers I know break the generalization in the article and follow this philosophy. They work as consultants making 5x the salary of their full-time counterparts, with precisely your mentality: I don't care if you respect me or honor me with social motivation or whatever. This is a business transaction, and I'll crank out amazing code at amazing speeds as long as you keep paying me $250/hour.

I need to get into this business. Couldn't agree more with the style. Somehow my managers have been convinced that financial incentives don't work in tech. Screw that. I think we should make t-shirts saying 'Fuck You, Pay Me'. startup anyone?

Well, we have dueling anecdotes, which makes it sound like it's time for a study. ;-)

(Unfortunately from what I can tell, the studies on how different kinds of motivation [intrinsic, tangible extrinsic, social, etc.] relate are all over the map, and appear to depend sensitively on the specific kind of task and setting.)

I don't think you have dueling anecdotes, just observation of the existence of red weasels and blue weasels. Until someone starts claiming that most weasels are some color, or that certain colored weasels tend to occur in certain kinds of environments, there's no need to fund extensive studies ;)

Maybe for them the task has gone from being cognitive to being mechanical.

Either by practise, or by some self-hypnosis-like trick.

If you left off the preamble, you probably would be at -4. People feel bad about downvoting someone after they say "I know I'll probably get downvoted for this, but...". Now we just need a greasemonkey script to prepend the phrase automagically.

hahaha damnation, I was going to go with - fuck all that, pay me.

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