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Comment by ElViajero | Hacker News Reader

> If one of us discovered a new technique for, say, dealing with a particular corner, we shared it with the other.

What is your incentive to do that? I see that as the key. In a company, employees needs an incentive to work together and be constructive. They are not friends.

If you do not get that incentives, if your department success means less budged for mine, if my colleague success puts my job at risk, if your project success creates a problem for mine, I will not be motivated to collaborate.

If you create that incentive of collaboration then the "challenge" factor will be there. I have worked in great teams where we were evaluated as a company, where bonuses were for everybody or no-one. And it was a very competitive environment, I wanted to be as good as any colleague, know as much as they did. And, I wanted them to succeed because it was awesome to see such great projects but also because it was good for myself.

I have not found any healthy company were competition was enforced top-down. Only when collaboration is designed and encouraged top-down then healthy sportsmanship arise from great engineers and teams.

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> What is your incentive to do that? I see that as the key. In a company, employees needs an incentive to work together and be constructive. They are not friends.

Remove individual metrics or performance indicators, make team success the important goal. Most of us work in a team of some kind, yet in places like retail sales they often pit employees against eachother with individual budgets instead of store budgets.

If you ever go into a clothing store and wonder why the changerooms look like they haven't been cleaned in weeks, that's probably why. If everyone is trying to meet an individual sales budget no one can afford the time to clean the store since it could cost them a sale. If it doesn't matter who gets the sale as there is only a store budget, they can work together to get all the extra tasks done. One person can clean the change rooms while the other takes sales etc.

When you start tracking a metric there can be all kinds of second order effects, so it's important to pick your metrics and goals wisely.

> Remove individual metrics or performance indicators, make team success the important goal.

This just moves the competitive boundary between teams, rather than individuals. It's not unheard of teams that compete and sabotage each other to make their project the most important and impactful.

Sure. The next logical step is to remove team metrics and performance indicators, and make departmental success the important goal.

Then switch deparmental for organisation-wide, then that for nation-wide, then that for world-wide.

The issue with that approach is that incentives are not always aligned. Not everyone is an altruist willing to give up their personal self-interest for the good of the company.

For example, you might have a legacy team whose future headcount growth is negatively impacted by a new team. Whether because this new team is automating tasks of the legacy team, or building a product that will cannibalize sales.

From the perspective of the company, the legacy team should embrace the future and allow themselves to be creatively destroyed.

But in reality, you have some leaders who do not want to give up power and will try to hold on, optimizing for personal incentives.

That's not a problem if the people in the old team understand that their security is tied up with the success of the organisation. I.e. if the new team does well, the organisation does well, and all employees are cared for.

If somehow the people in the old team get into their heads the idea that organisation-wide success stands in conflict with their security, then you have a problem.

But the problem is with management, not the people on the teams.

Edit: in general, it's a common disease in companies to associate people with teams rather than the organisation. People don't become useless because their previous roles are obsoleted. Those are still valuable people and sure, there's a cost to retraining them, but the cost to letting them go (in terms of what it teaches the rest of your employees) is so much greater. (Though unfortunately harder to measure.)

We can thank Jack Welch of GE for that attitude. I thought the same thing in the 80’s when GE was shedding thousands of employees. That those employees should be useable for new endeavors. Turns out retraining is a cost the company can externalize with firings

I’d say that the logical conclusion is that KPI’s are the problem here.

Let the team measure themselves, bit give them a clear mandate and shared purpose.

When teams are incomparable, no such rivalry can make sense.

Each “step” reduces an individual’s power in determining the outcome, and thus their responsibility and commitment. People also know some intuitive game theory; They won’t take an excessive burden for a shared prize, as that will ultimately burn them out in the long run.

> make team success the important goal

That leads to the prisoner's dilemma and tragedy of the commons. When team success is the goal, slackers thrive.

> > make team success the important goal

> That leads to the prisoner's dilemma and tragedy of the commons. When team success is the goal, slackers thrive.

Teams have lifecycles too, so there are dynamics of team selection and teammate selection that can help with those problems.

Does that encourage effort or mediocrity though?

As if my additional efforts are not going to move the needle much and there is nothing individually for me to win, why not just enjoy the ride?

Enjoying the ride is miles better than sabotaging your team.

Teams don't work in a vacuum and it's not that hard to eventually find the slacker in a team. But you have team goals and individual goals. Team performance management and individual one. This is where good management comes in, to find a way to engage and motivate even a slacker, to get them to deliver at least the same amount of value you put in them.

If the easy things fail (usually the financial or flexibility kind) there are other options. Find them the same position in a different team with different dynamics (a great individual can sink if everyone else on the team is much better, or much worse), find them a different position where they can shine (you can start as a mediocre midfielder and end up a successful goalkeeper), or even have them find a different job entirely.

Recent research shows that financial and other extrinsic motivators actually inhibit performance.

After a worker has achieved a base level of income that makes their life comfortable, any extra treats they receive will decrease their interest in the core function of their work, moving their focus to the extrinsic motivator instead.

I've also heard interpretations of this effect that explain it as: being rewarded can demean the value of work, because it may feel as though the work itself is a chore that nobody would do unless they got rewarded.

In general, I believe that extrinsic motivators lead employees to follow their instincts less and focus on anything that will net them a reward. This means that even if someone has a great idea for improving some aspect of the work a company is doing, it might not get done. They are instead being rewarded for whatever arbitrary KPI that management has decided is important.

In fields where there is a single clear KPI, all processes are mature, management has a clear view of the entire value chain, and workers are focused on a single task that is highly tied to the KPI --- e.g. yields in manufacturing tied to a production line worker --- sure, rewarding high KPI is not a terrible idea (or at least as terrible as it would be otherwise). But whenever a workers focus can be co-opted by bonuses I believe bonuses tied to KPIs are a bad idea.

RE: your second point, I absolutely agree. How well a person "fits" in a team has a high impact on a person's motivation.

what research are you referring to?

It seems I have to qualify "recent", this was already studied in the 70's [1]. But recent material is available as well [2],[3],[4],[6]. [3] provides a view from an economists perspective (incentives), [6] looks at motivation of employees and compares to performance and well-being outcomes. The psychological question is about intrinsic vs. extrinsic motivation, and has been studied for a long time now, for an overview, see [5] or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motivation

1. "The Effects of Contingent and Noncontingent Rewards and Controls on Intrinsic Motivation", 1972, Edward L.Deci, [Available online] http://selfdeterminationtheory.org/SDT/documents/1972_Deci_O...

2. Punished by Rewards, Alfie Kohn, 1999, https://www.alfiekohn.org/punished-rewards/

3. "Intrinsic and Extrinsic Motivation ", Roland Bénabou & Jean Tirole, 2003, https://academic.oup.com/restud/article-abstract/70/3/489/15...

4. Intrinsic and Extrinsic Motivation - The Search for Optimal Motivation and Performance, Carol Sansone & Judith Harackiewicz, 2000 https://www.amazon.com/Intrinsic-Extrinsic-Motivation-Perfor...

5. "Intrinsic and Extrinsic Motivation", Lisa Legault, 2016, [Available online] http://www.lcwu.edu.pk/ocd/cfiles/Professional%20Studies/FC/...

6. "Do intrinsic and extrinsic motivation relate differently to employee outcomes?", Kuvaas et al., 2017, [Available online] https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Bard_Kuvaas/publication...

EDIT: added more recent sources

But you're ignoring the "demotivating" factors. Getting a pay bump might not be a (good) motivator in itself but it may remove a demotivator. So sometime these moves are to release the handbrake rather than make the engine more powerful.

That's correct, that's why I said financial motivators don't matter _after_ you already have a comfortable life (your needs are satisfied). [1] and [6] both argue that rewards that aren't conditioned on performance (e.g. salary) don't detract from intrinsic motivation and that a competitive salary is a good motivator.

> financial motivators don't matter _after_ you already have a comfortable life

Oh, this is a slightly different topic. Of course if your belly is growling money will motivate you a lot, and that motivation tends to go down the more you go past your comfort baseline.

But think of pay disparity for example. Maybe your belly is full but your slacker colleague is making more money than you. That has a good chance of demotivating you, making you ask "why should I try harder?". Reducing this disparity and (perceived) inequity, eliminating the demotivating factor, goes a long way and has a far longer lasting effect than just the same extra money would bring otherwise.

I totally agree, salaries aren't bad, bonuses are.

And pay disparity can be a problem, especially if salary data is hidden. I think most of the time the problem is a lack of openness about salaries and why they are as they are.

Because you don't want to be the one who is dragging down your friends. Because you are proud of providing a first-class service. Because people depend on your effort.

Its up to the rest of the team to realose you are not pulling your weight

> Remove individual metrics or performance indicators, make team success the important goal.

Why would a high performer stay there? The rest of the team drags him down and there is nothing he can do about it, he will just leave for a position where he doesn't have to pick up the slack of the entire team before he gets acknowledged.

It depends on the specific context of course, but I think there's a fallacy in the assumption that the high performer can perform better than a well working team would. A business is also an organism with many moving parts, if you optimize for just one particular metric and hire high performance individuals based on that, you end up neglecting the other parts of the organisation.

Either way you can make that decision, perhaps your particular business is better off with high performing individuals. Like a door-to-door sales company probably doesn't benefit that much from team dynamics, and you'd definitely get slackers in that context. But a software team more often than not gets impacted negatively by a rockstar billowing out code rather than organizing with the team.

> What is your incentive to do that?

You have to define who the external "enemy" is. If your enemy is the person closest to you, you will not share.

But as said, they raced as a duo against other teams, so then the external enemy becomes the other team.

I'm sure when they shared with other teams, where was even another party that was the enemy (other state? other countries?).

I think in a company it's always healthy to define an outside "enemy" that you are competing against, now within the company.

Your incentive is to beat the bigger game, that is, the one that maintains your friendship and keeps the other person playing. If one person is significantly better than the other and wins all the time, the other party will lose interest and will stop playing.

> In a company, employees needs an incentive to work together and be constructive.

I think this is exactly backwards. The overwhelming majority of people I have met in life are by default collaborative and supportive.

What screws this up is the introduction of bad incentives, often unintended ones.

I'm not saying there are no natural incentives to competitiveness etc., but if you artificially introduce more of them it tends to be net negative. Lots of companies do this, even without intending to.

> What is your incentive to do that? I see that as the key. In a company, employees needs an incentive to work together and be constructive. They are not friends.

It all depends on what game you are playing. On one level you can characterize it as zero-sum vs. positive sum, on another level as closed (play once) vs. open ended (keep playing).

When your goal is to keep playing and improving iteratively as a player, it is definitely to the advantage of each player to help their counterpart improve, regardless of who is currently 'winning'.

You can also pose the whole thing as an iterated prisoner's dilemma, where the best overall strategy is tit-for-tat with generosity (default to cooperation as a starting move) and forgiveness (occasionally cooperate even if the other defects).

There are additional iterative loops that could be going on too, like opponent/partner selection even when the game is ostensibly zero-sum (eg. "nobody likes a sore loser"), and finally there is the meta-game of game selection, which can be characterized as 'culture'.

In a business setting the incentive to share your solutions with other teams is the hope/expectation that they'll share theirs.

What good is it if 2 teams are solving the same problems. It's a waste of time when the other team could be solving a different problem. At the end of it you share your solution.

There's too many cases of teams just being walled off from everyone else and then duplicate work being done.

> In a company, employees needs an incentive to work together and be constructive.

Isn't the incentive getting paid?

No. If it is, management has failed.

You should be paid enough just for showing up to take money off the table as a concern. If you worry about money, you will not perform at your capacity. You need to be motivated by better things, like sense of accomplishment, the joy of figuring stuff out and solving problems, teamwork, etc.

As a motivator, money is a notch above the whip, of course, but not very good in the grand scheme of things.

The book Drive is very good and discusses the latest evidence around motivation at depth. Obligatory reading for anyone in a leadership like role, in my opinion.

And that book has been a blotch into peoples well being since forever.

Money, no-one shows for work (well almost no-one) if they don't get paid. Everyone I know doesn't give a fuck about a sense of accomplishment. If the choice is 'work for X and get a sense of accomplishment or get 3X without it'. (If I remember correctly) The book's research while valid, leaves out a lot of counter research and selective selects some data over other.

Unless you are curing cancer, give me more money. Want to motivate me? put a 100k bonus at the end of the year. I don't give a fuck about teamwork or to feel accomplished. Money makes the world go around, and that is why I show up for work.

I think I spot several mistakes of reasoning in your comment, but they essentially boil down to this: it sounds like you're too confident in your personal experiences to generalise to humans as a species.

I think -- like you describe -- that many people will go through life only ever motivating their work with money. I think this can happen for any number of reasons, some of which are just personality traits, and that's fine.

In other words, I won't contest your experiences because I fully believe you share them with many other people. However, I also don't think they invalidate the general results that a lot of people could be paid enough in a good enough environment to remove money as a motivator, that would be cheaper for companies, and society would be better off for it.

Maybe you are right, but to be fair, I worked all over Europe in various countries and cultures. Pretty much everyone I worked with in engineering circles would prefer more money over an 'employee of the month' award.

The thing is, when people/self help gurus/whatnot talk about money not bringing happiness and job satisfaction and whatnot, they are using that against you (general you). What is paid enough anyway? If I have 5 kids, and you have none, it will probably be different. Or if your hobby is race cars and for me walking in the park? And the most important is, more money = safer future. If you exclude the FAANGs, most people are underpaid (in the sense of being enough to be happy and safe for the future) and the 75K and money doesn't equal happiness is used against them. It is nothing but owners/managers trying to get the most of the person for the least they can pay (why is taboo to talk about salaries? or you are asked sometimes to not speak of the bonus you got, etc?)

Just assume if a company is trying to 'convince' you for less money (even if you are asking for 500k and they want to offer you 450k 'only) by saying they are good company, teamwork, etc etc, just be sure, 99% of the time the owner/manager wants those 50k for his own bank account/benefit. If money didn't matter, the owners would be super happy to give their profits in forms of higher wages to the employees.

You might be surprised, but I agree with almost all of that.

I want to emphasise that when I talk about motivation higher than money, it is definitely not an employee of the month award. If that is your idea of intrinsic motivation, I can absolutely understand your confusion.

The threshold for how much money is enough money to not be a concern depends on both personal opinions as well as the community around the person, just as you say.

If a company tries to convince me it's worth a pay cut to work there, that's a strong signal they are running an awful environment.

The best places I've worked are the ones where managers say, "If you ever feel economically undervalued, please just ask for a higher salary. It would be so silly to lose you over something we can so easily fix."

When I talk about "money should not be a concern" I really mean that. If they are trying to get you for less money, then clearly money is a concern around there, invalidating everything else about intrinsic motivation.

The reason why so many people are talking past you is almost no one has had a boss that says "just ask for a higher salary" and most bosses act like the king of shit mountain for giving you 1% more than you got last year.

One of the most common pretenses used? Family. We're a family, we work like a family, everyone here is a family. Wouldn't you work overtime for the family? You should sacrifice for the family. You should die for the family.

I like to imagine that if I felt I had my needs taken care of, I would not care about the money. But because money is linked to things which feel like existential threats like not finding a mate or losing the roof over my head, pursuing it is 'a notch above the whip'.

But what is 'my needs taken care of'? You never have to work a day in your life and will have enough money to maintain your desired style of living?

That is why 'my needs taken care of' issue comes up to me. Yes, 100% of the jobs I worked paid me enough to have a decent life, but if I got fired and couldn't find a job, I would be on the street after a few months. That is why the 75K USD or whatever it was in the book saying it didn't improve happiness is bollocks. You might not starve in SF with 75K, but I assure you an extra 20k would make you much happier, even if not for the peace of mind that you could save it for a rainy day.

If we talk about UBI or millionaires, sure, money stops being a concern, but I also don't see a lot of millionaires going over job boards trying to find a job that gives them a sense of accomplishment. They are doing their own things to achieve that happiness, and I doubt is working for someone else (some exceptions of course)

Not to be facetious, but I referred to the feeling of having my needs taken care of because I know that I often am not a rational actor. If all we did was forage for nuts and shared them because we felt that everybody did their part, I would probably be very happy sharing those communal meals. When someone drives by in a huge yacht spewing diesel fumes and soot, the enjoyment I got from our humble communal meals is easily vanquished. The meal did not change in any appreciable way, but understanding that a huge amount of the resources we need to survive is wasted on an outsider's frivolous amusement leads to discontentment.

In practice, the worst extreme of this dynamic seems to be the use of pale-skinned models for advertising in areas where people have dark skin. The reasoning might be as simple as pale skin showing up brighter in print, but the outcome is otherwise perfectly healthy people getting body dysphoria.

I rarely want to do something someone else tells me to do. I have my own dreams and ambitions.

The only reason I work for others is money. Money is a path to freedom.

It doesn't help that half of the forces in our industry are concerned with accruing power at the expense of individuals. I want nothing to do with that sort of thing.

I'm not sure what your comment means. Yes, there's a whole philosophical debate of what is value and does it make sense to sell your labour at all. That's not what I meant.

All I said is that if you instruct people to do a job and tell them "Every time your work is of excellent quality, you will get a temporary increase in payment, and every time it is of bad quality, you will get a temporary decrease in payment", on average, one of three things will happen:

1. The quality of their work stays the same. (For example because the environment is not set up such that it's in their power to do a better job, or you're measuring quality on a different dimension than is relevant to this person.)

2. The quality of their work declines. (For example because they don't agree with the exchange rate you're offering on money-for-quality.)

3. They find a way to cheat the system to make it look like the quality of their work improves even though it does not. (Because you have made money rather than quality the goal to chase after.)

You'll note that the desired outcome just isn't there. This is for many diverse reasons in different circumstances and the book I mentioned goes into each.

If instead you instruct people to do a job and create an environment in which they can feel proud over good work, in which they can fulfill themselves, and be a valued and active part of something bigger, you'll on average see one outcome:

1. The quality of their work improves. (Because that's the only way for them to trigger their internal reward circuits.)

Well, not quite. It takes one more thing: in order for the quality of their work to improve, they must feel secure, both physically, and fiscally. If you threaten them with the whip, or there's not enough money to make their ends comfortably meet, the quality of their work won't improve.

> Isn't the incentive getting paid?

No, humans are not coin-operated robots. There is an entire field of psychology dedicated to this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_and_organizational_...

Also it's very well known that most people are willing to accept salaries below market rates to work on topics/goal/environments they really care about.

Equally, many work in ethically controversial organizations because of higher salaries.

The modern engineer treats their salary as a birthright, worried only that it is not large enough to justify their true best efforts.

But seriously, the psychology of worker incentives has been studied. Things like employee of the month and yearly bonuses exist because salary alone did less. You compete internally to be promoted, recognised as a top mind, paid more. These things are to your direct advantage.

Obviously at a small startup you want it to not go bust. Your incentive for getting paid next month is real. Once you are at facebook, well it is going to keep paying you. You don't have tangible real impact on company outcome. So you start optimising yours

> Things like employee of the month and yearly bonuses exist

I thought they existed because it's cheaper to hand out worthless certificates and occasional one-off payments than actually increase employees' wages. Which is why "employee of the month" and other non-monetary rewards are popular minimum/low wage workplaces.

Agreed from me. I would be surprised if these things didn't exist before research into them happened. And then I would be further surprised if the research want just a post hoc justification of the idea.

I wouldn't be shocked to find out I am wrong. Just surprised.

> Isn't the incentive getting paid?

Yes, that is my point.

If I get paid more if your project fails because there is more budged for my project. My motivation is against collaboration.

I do it for the money. And the company, thru forcing me to compete with my colleagues for budged, and bonuses, gives me an incentive to not help, or in the worse case scenario, to sabotage their work.

And managers cannot do much about it if there is a strong economic incentive to be hostile to your colleagues.

Only if more pay follows teamwork and constructive work. In many places it does not.

For example, say that there is one team lead position available. It probably pays more. My incentive as an employee is do what it takes to get that position even if it damages my company.

My incentive is that my coworkers aren't my enemies either.

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