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