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Comment by vitaflo | Hacker News Reader

I’ve always said if you want to get a developer to do something, just question their intelligence. This works on way too may otherwise smart people.

It somewhat makes sense, many devs grew up smart and were told they were smart from a young age. You need to be to do the job. It becomes part of their identity and is a glaring blind spot for many.

I’ve worked with way too many devs that were so afraid of being wrong or had to prove they were right and were taken advantage of because of it.

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This is hilarious in part because I see it in myself.

Can you give an examply of questioning intelligence?

You’re not the kind of person who can figure that out?

A clever manager would never question but talk about how something looks like a true challenge and just leave it at that.

Any variant of the old "I bet you can't <X>" trick. Basically it's a form of 'negging'[0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negging

Not sure how giving people motivation is exploitation. You still have to pay them to own what they built, otherwise you just motivated them to build something for themselves, either way it isn't exploitative.

If you replace the word motivation in this comment with manipulation, you should see why it's exploitative.

If you say that a great teacher manipulates their students to do more overtime work is that exploitation just because we changed the words? Normally people would use the words "motivate" and "homework", but the meaning of the sentence is the same.

I'm getting paid by the hour, not by the task. As such, there is no point in "motivating" me to get more work done from my perspective, other than to manipulate me for your own benefit and replace me as soon as the overdrive's price needs to get paid.

If you could work without caring about pay but still get paid then that would be optimal, no? We are talking about that situation here, someone made people do work for non-monetary rewards but they still get paid, to me that seems like a good thing. I'd rather work because I want to than because I have to, call it manipulating or motivating I don't care, if they can make me forget the drudgery when doing it that is a good thing.

But apparently that makes me stupid, I don't see why that is dumb. Being manipulated to want to work is a good thing if you want the money.

The teacher manipulates the student for the student's benefit. The business owner / manager manipulates the employee for the business' benefit.

See how you needed to use a teaching example to not make it sound bad?

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