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Comment by jacobolus | Hacker News Reader

> If someone is providing you a service for free that accounts for a very meaningful percentage of revenue, how much revenue could they be generating for you if you actually incentivized them to do that work? 1.25x? 1.5x? 2x? More?

In some cases, it could be less output, or lower quality. Money (or other explicit rewards) changes the psychology of doing work vs. volunteering it. It adds pressure, makes the work feel like a job instead of a hobby, and can lead the person doing the work to choke on deadlines, slack off, look for shortcuts, or even give up entirely.

Of course, people providing valuable services to a for-profit business should be fairly compensated, and companies shouldn’t be trying to exploit volunteers.

But monetary “incentives” are in general quite a terrible system for eliciting good work.

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I used to write several short articles per day, over several years. I did it for free and highly enjoyed it, but I was eventually paid to do the same (on the same topic), so I can second the commentor above. Once it was paid, I lost interest over time and saw it as a burden more than a pleasure.

It's hard to make money for creative endeavors, for several reasons, and there are generally two ways to make money from them: put everything into it and hope for the best, or have a "real job" and do the creative thing on the side. Regardless, and personally-speaking, I prefer doing creative things for free because that's the best way to keep my interest-level high.

>But monetary “incentives” are in general quite a terrible system for eliciting good work.

I'm glad I don't work for you.

I think what jacobolus is saying is after a certain point, more money won't necessarily lead to better quality of work.

[0] https://hbr.org/1993/09/why-incentive-plans-cannot-work

My argument is that if you pay less than your competitors, you can't expect to hire and retain the best people.

edit: More to the point, I think this idea that people don't work for money is one pushed by management at the expense of the workers, and when I hear employers putting that out there, I assume those employers are... bad to work for, because they think that by being manipulative, they can get you to work for less.

Usually, those employers have less pleasant cultures and pay less than employers who simply pay more than their competition.

I guess since those mangers are generally well paid they must be bad at what they do.

Much of the best work I know about was done as people’s hobby projects, self-selected school projects, self-selected projects funded by some kind of patronage system with money not directly tied to output, etc.

I don’t employ anyone, so you don’t need to worry about whether I would hire you to keep doing your hobby and kill your love for it.

That point, however, is a lot higher than zero, more so in areas with a high cost of living, and still more so for a 19 year old who doesn't have any savings to fall back on and has to establish his earning baseline.

No, I think parts of this are very true. Apple Retail doesn't pay their staff commissions so there's no incentive to drive expensive sales that the staff personally profit from (partly I guess because of just how expensive and seasonal Apple product sales are?).

Myself, and a few other developers, refuse to monetise our third-party apps for the video game Destiny because doing it for free means we have no obligation to any customers. If I was being paid to do this, I would enjoy it a lot less.

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