Citing Bob Reselman’s “Coding Slave” Darrell gives his take on how to fix the software development industry

In addition to paying great programmers more, we need to pay crappy, or maybe "less sophisticated", programmers much less.

On one hand, he’s absolutely right : great programmers should be rewarded. On the other hand, I don’t normally see overpaid software developers.  And the “fat” that I do see that should be cut, can never be because of politics, policy, etc.  I do, however, run into lots and lots of under-paid, overworked developers – this the is part of the problem that the guild idea from Coding Slave is meant to address. But the interesting thing about this thread, however is Bob Reselman’s comment to Darrell’s post:

You bring up some interesting thoughts on the nature of human motivation. I am very interested to know your thinking on this question: What do you suppose motivates (motivated) an artist such as Van Gogh, Jackson Pollock or Charles Ives? Pollock made some money for his art, but Van Gogh and Ives made not a cent from an endeavor to which they devoted their lives. I wonder, is there something intrinsically motivating in the act of creation?

In my previous life as a student of behavioral psychology, one of the things we were taught was to be very careful about guessing what may be motivating for someone.  We called this Putative thinking.  What is motivating to one person may not be for another – there aren’t really any generally accepted motivators. 

Say you take Darrell’s assumption that money is motivating and you give your good developers raises.  You may find that you wind up reinforcing some adjunct behavior - behavior that has nothing to do with your target behavior.  Wearing ties, showing up early, speaking up in meetings, gossiping, whatever.. The point is, you have no idea if your money has had any real affect on the target behavior writing better code, until you see the better code being written.

Okay, now take Bob’s idea that the act of creating is motivating.  Well, he could be on to something here, and it certainly costs a lot less than Darrell’s idea, but I have a feeling that this may only be motivating for some. Again, the idea is Putative.  You may end up affecting your target behavior, you also may reinforce some other strange behavior that you didn’t intend to reinforce.  You may even end up with some avoidance behavior.

So what you do to increase the target behavior of writing better code?  Well, my point is, you won’t know until you try something, and see what happens.  Now, this idea isn’t any great help if you’re an IT manager, but a behavior analyst would change the environment until there was an increase in the target behavior. When they see an increase, they know that the change they made had an effect. They've then isolated the variables that affect their behavior, and they can begin to make real changes.

What I do like about Darrell and Bob’s ideas are that they focus on the environment.  This is in stark contrast to what I’ve been noticing lately – a lot of what I call “individual differences thinking.” In this type of thinking people say “some developers are good, others aren’t, that’s just the way it is.”  This kind of thinking focuses on identifying and weeding out the superstar developers, not on creating the conditions that foster coding better. 

Since I’ll always be a behavior analyst at heart, I believe this type of indiviual differences thinking is flawed, and is a bad trend in our industry.   I think we all can learn to code better, superstar or not.

-Brendan