although you might be undervaluaing the PR you get from winning or possibly even just participating in the contest. may or may not re-balance the equation, but its still something of value not necessarily being considered.
I won the contest (with a project I had already built and was paid for) and won the netbook (which I love) but it didn't get me much PR. Granted, I wasn't selling anything or promoting a service, but the traffic increase to my blog was negligible.
if you're not contracted out to test for vulnerabilities and exploits then there better be some other incentive involved since you're no longer living in your parents basement.
I don't necessarily agree - sometimes restrictions and boundaries actually spur the imagination, and deadlines definitely keep one's ass in gear and productive. I took a photography class in college so I could get access to the darkroom - expecting to hate the assignments for 'boxing in' my artistic spirit. Instead, they just gave me ideas. All my favorite photos and prints were made in that class.
Regardless, no one's restricting you to anything... This is a hacking contest, not a real job, so the choice to just not participate costs you nothing. To me, however, the challenge of building a cool app on a new & innovative API on a very short timeline sounds kind of intriguing actually.
For some of us, things are more fun if there's no possibility of money at all; bringing money into it means a cost/benefit calculation, whereas doing something for fun doesn't usually involve that. I like playing WoW, but if I were paid for playing WoW at $5/hr, I would do less of it.
Really? You'd pay WoW less if you were paid (and there were no other difference)? That makes no sense.
Saying "I like to hack for free" is not the same as saying "I like to hack twilio apps on a deadline for free." If twilio were saying, "sign up, do whatever hacking you'd be doing otherwise, and we'll pay you some", it's just stupid not to. But that's not what they're asking. They're asking you to write demo apps for them on spec. That's why it's a little insulting.
I'm not going to argue that it makes sense, exactly, but it's a feature of how my preferences work. If I get paid to do something, it short-circuits the "is this fun" logic in favor of "is this worth doing monetarily". They're not really additive.
This is a common feature of how humans work and it is backed by volumes of research.
Motivation consists of two types: internal (or intrinsic) and external. External is what you do because somebody will reward you, usually with money. Internal is what you do because you love to do it.
In this particular respect, motivation in most people is a zero sum game. If you do something because you love it, and then someone starts paying you for it, the degree to which you do it because you love it must decrease.
That's why many people who love to do something so much they decide to go get paid for it gradually find themselves not liking at all what they used to love to do.
The fact that it's common doesn't make it less stupid.
It's not actually a zero-sum game, that's just something you pulled out of your ass.
Quoting social scientists as if they were bearers of truth doesn't really seem like a winning strategy.
Most people who try to do what they love for pay don't really; they end up doing something that requires the same skillset as what they love, and of course they end up miserable as a result.
Humans are not rational when it comes to money. There are many studies that illustrate this. For example, if you give someone a choice between a candy bar and $1.00, they will choose the candy bar with greater frequency than if you give them $1.00 and offer them the choice of buying a candy bar for $1.00. It's not rational -- you end up the same in either study, but it's the way we work. In this case, being paid $5.00 per hour turns WoW from something you want to do to a job you get paid to do, and you think about it differently.
Psychologists explain it by saying that external rewards reduce intrinsic motivation. An article from the Boston Globe is here: http://www.csse.uwa.edu.au/~pk/motivation.html "If a reward - money, awards, praise, or winning a contest - comes to be seen as the reason one is engaging in an activity, that activity will be viewed as less enjoyable in its own right." Wikipedia also has an interesting article about this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overjustification_effect
I didn't say or imply humans were rational about money, I was pointing out a case where one was being irrational, and noting that the scenario they brought up didn't actually map to the issue at hand anyways.
And the reason it didn't map? Because it tried to introduce an external motivator to coerce hackers to engage in a particular activity that they weren't otherwise intrinsically motivated to perform.
And when did we start giving social "scientists" the final say on these things? Setting up contrived scenarios with children and college students hardly strikes me as definitive. Real scenarios where people are given free reign to do just as they like for pay or meaningful reward are few and far between. "Getting paid to do what you love" usually isn't - it's much more commonly getting paid to do something that requires the same skillset as the thing you love, and it's obvious why that would kill motivation.
I listen to psychologists on this because they're the people who have done rigorous studies on the issue. Seems like a good reason to listen to them. Why are you railing against this? The data are against you.
Do you think your links constitute a fair representation of that data that's against me? Go read them again. The foundational study was with 5 year olds who got a ribbon. Follow on studies were college students in creative writing courses and other fully contrived scenarios. You really want to base your beliefs about a fundamental trait of humanity on that?
Just look around you. People work for money, for sex, for food, for all kinds of external motivators, far more than to fulfill their inner personal happy centers. The fact that some people are miserable because they think they've found their dream job when really it's just another way to pay the bills has other explanations than this weak sauce.
My links constitute some of the research done about this issue. Do you have any research that disagrees with the data I've provided?
Of course people work for money, for sex, for food, etc. I wasn't saying they don't. What I am saying is that people's intrinsic motivation to do a task is lessened when they're paid to do so. There's a story -- I don't remember where I read it, unfortunately -- that when a group of coders were paid for each bug found, the number of bugs found went up. However, when the bugs-for-pay program ended, the number of bugs found went down. Their intrinsic motivation was lessened when they have extrinsic rewards for doing so -- they no longer looked as hard, or as long for bugs as when their motivation was internal. I don't know why you're calling it "weak sauce"; it's been studied and found to be true. Is there anything beyond "you don't like the idea" that you can cite as reason you think it's false?
There are disagreeing studies cited in the Wikipedia article you linked, did you even read it?
I'm also confused why you think your bug story supports your point. Are there lots of developers who derive great personal satisfaction from churning out bug reports? Leaving aside the fact that #bug reports is a shitty metric, they did go up when the reward was introduced. The fact that they went down again after the reward was taken away means absolutely nothing in the context of this conversation, because they weren't internally motivated before.
As I see it, there's a single disagreeing study: Cameron, J. (2001), and that study found that people increased intrinsic motivation when they were rewarded for either beating others, or when intrinsic motivation was low to begin with. Neither of these were what we were talking about. We were discussing people's motivations for things that they initially had high intrinsic motivation, and we were discussing people getting paid hourly to play WoW (not for beating others) and people winning a contest (and beating others).
I think developers do derive personal satisfaction for doing their jobs well, yes. I think that doing your job is an intrinsic motivation.
Doing your job well != churning out bug reports, which was what you said was being incentivized and measured. That also seems like a pretty bad fit for the original scenario we were discussing, but that didn't stop you from trotting it out anyways.
Bottom line: people do respond to external motivation, all the freaking time, as long as its appropriate to what they're being asked to do. Refusing to be paid to do what you'd be doing anyways, no strings attached, is, plain and simple, irrational. But, in reality, very few people ever get the opportunity to exercise that irrationality, because when someone pays you, there are pretty much always strings attached, and the strings are what are demotivating.
Ok, I see that we're not really having a conversation anymore, so I think I'm just about done. Two quick points: one -- if your job is to find bugs, finding lots of bugs is doing your job well. Two -- I'm not saying this behavior is rational; in my first comment in this thread started out "Humans are not rational when it comes to money". However, this behavior is studied and shown to be true. I'm sorry you don't like it.
If your job is to find bugs, you're not a developer. You're a tester. I personally don't know a lot of people who have a deep and driving internal fire to be a tester, but, okay, fine, they may exist. They weren't the people you described, though: your example was people who weren't motivated, were given an incentive and became motivated, and then went back to being unmotivated after the incentive was taken away. How does that prove your point?
And again, I never argued that people are rational about money, I'm just pointing out that the particular behavior the op talked about was irrational. If you're getting defensive because I'm pointing that out, and you agree that it's irrational, then I don't know what the argument's about.
The fact that studies exist doesn't make their conclusions (or your interpretation of their conclusions) true. The specific studies you brought up in your articles all sounded like they had pretty big flaws, given they were applied to 5 year olds and college kids in contrived situations. If I got a stupid ribbon just for drawing a picture, I'd feel embarrassed and patronized, and of course I wouldn't want to do it again for the same person. That doesn't prove that humans have a weird quirk that responds poorly to external motivators, it just proves they have understandable emotional responses to weird situations. Real life, otoh, provides ample evidence that people respond productively to external motivators all the time.
As for not having a conversation anymore, were we ever? You keep throwing Teh Studies at me, ignoring the reasons I gave for why I don't think they're valid and dinging me for pointing to one that wasn't perfectly applicable to the original situation (even though I was only using it as an example of disagreement with the studies you had brought up, some of which themselves weren't perfectly applicable, either). If you want to pretend like you're the dignified salon member adhering to the rules of civilized discourse, that's fine, but I don't think it's accurate.
well, the netbook is worth around $250 and then there is the $250 credit --- so if you take 50 hours to build your submission then it is about $10 an hour. doubt it would take that long though.
just a tip to all startups that have a blog separate from their main website - please include an "about us" page link on the blog, or a 2 sentence summary of what your company does somewhere in the sidebar. Or at least a link to your company's product page.
(took a surprising amount of time for me to figure out what exactly Twilio offers, as I had never heard of them before...)
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[ 49.9 ms ] story [ 273 ms ] threadif you're not contracted out to test for vulnerabilities and exploits then there better be some other incentive involved since you're no longer living in your parents basement.
Regardless, no one's restricting you to anything... This is a hacking contest, not a real job, so the choice to just not participate costs you nothing. To me, however, the challenge of building a cool app on a new & innovative API on a very short timeline sounds kind of intriguing actually.
I suppose you don't do anything for fun, just code for money?
Saying "I like to hack for free" is not the same as saying "I like to hack twilio apps on a deadline for free." If twilio were saying, "sign up, do whatever hacking you'd be doing otherwise, and we'll pay you some", it's just stupid not to. But that's not what they're asking. They're asking you to write demo apps for them on spec. That's why it's a little insulting.
Motivation consists of two types: internal (or intrinsic) and external. External is what you do because somebody will reward you, usually with money. Internal is what you do because you love to do it.
In this particular respect, motivation in most people is a zero sum game. If you do something because you love it, and then someone starts paying you for it, the degree to which you do it because you love it must decrease.
That's why many people who love to do something so much they decide to go get paid for it gradually find themselves not liking at all what they used to love to do.
It's not actually a zero-sum game, that's just something you pulled out of your ass.
Quoting social scientists as if they were bearers of truth doesn't really seem like a winning strategy.
Most people who try to do what they love for pay don't really; they end up doing something that requires the same skillset as what they love, and of course they end up miserable as a result.
Psychologists explain it by saying that external rewards reduce intrinsic motivation. An article from the Boston Globe is here: http://www.csse.uwa.edu.au/~pk/motivation.html "If a reward - money, awards, praise, or winning a contest - comes to be seen as the reason one is engaging in an activity, that activity will be viewed as less enjoyable in its own right." Wikipedia also has an interesting article about this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overjustification_effect
And the reason it didn't map? Because it tried to introduce an external motivator to coerce hackers to engage in a particular activity that they weren't otherwise intrinsically motivated to perform.
And when did we start giving social "scientists" the final say on these things? Setting up contrived scenarios with children and college students hardly strikes me as definitive. Real scenarios where people are given free reign to do just as they like for pay or meaningful reward are few and far between. "Getting paid to do what you love" usually isn't - it's much more commonly getting paid to do something that requires the same skillset as the thing you love, and it's obvious why that would kill motivation.
Just look around you. People work for money, for sex, for food, for all kinds of external motivators, far more than to fulfill their inner personal happy centers. The fact that some people are miserable because they think they've found their dream job when really it's just another way to pay the bills has other explanations than this weak sauce.
Of course people work for money, for sex, for food, etc. I wasn't saying they don't. What I am saying is that people's intrinsic motivation to do a task is lessened when they're paid to do so. There's a story -- I don't remember where I read it, unfortunately -- that when a group of coders were paid for each bug found, the number of bugs found went up. However, when the bugs-for-pay program ended, the number of bugs found went down. Their intrinsic motivation was lessened when they have extrinsic rewards for doing so -- they no longer looked as hard, or as long for bugs as when their motivation was internal. I don't know why you're calling it "weak sauce"; it's been studied and found to be true. Is there anything beyond "you don't like the idea" that you can cite as reason you think it's false?
I'm also confused why you think your bug story supports your point. Are there lots of developers who derive great personal satisfaction from churning out bug reports? Leaving aside the fact that #bug reports is a shitty metric, they did go up when the reward was introduced. The fact that they went down again after the reward was taken away means absolutely nothing in the context of this conversation, because they weren't internally motivated before.
I think developers do derive personal satisfaction for doing their jobs well, yes. I think that doing your job is an intrinsic motivation.
Bottom line: people do respond to external motivation, all the freaking time, as long as its appropriate to what they're being asked to do. Refusing to be paid to do what you'd be doing anyways, no strings attached, is, plain and simple, irrational. But, in reality, very few people ever get the opportunity to exercise that irrationality, because when someone pays you, there are pretty much always strings attached, and the strings are what are demotivating.
And again, I never argued that people are rational about money, I'm just pointing out that the particular behavior the op talked about was irrational. If you're getting defensive because I'm pointing that out, and you agree that it's irrational, then I don't know what the argument's about.
The fact that studies exist doesn't make their conclusions (or your interpretation of their conclusions) true. The specific studies you brought up in your articles all sounded like they had pretty big flaws, given they were applied to 5 year olds and college kids in contrived situations. If I got a stupid ribbon just for drawing a picture, I'd feel embarrassed and patronized, and of course I wouldn't want to do it again for the same person. That doesn't prove that humans have a weird quirk that responds poorly to external motivators, it just proves they have understandable emotional responses to weird situations. Real life, otoh, provides ample evidence that people respond productively to external motivators all the time.
As for not having a conversation anymore, were we ever? You keep throwing Teh Studies at me, ignoring the reasons I gave for why I don't think they're valid and dinging me for pointing to one that wasn't perfectly applicable to the original situation (even though I was only using it as an example of disagreement with the studies you had brought up, some of which themselves weren't perfectly applicable, either). If you want to pretend like you're the dignified salon member adhering to the rules of civilized discourse, that's fine, but I don't think it's accurate.
Pricing http://www.twilio.com/international-calling-rates
Account Configuration http://www.twilio.com/user/account/international
International FAQ http://www.twilio.com/international-faq
There you go!
(took a surprising amount of time for me to figure out what exactly Twilio offers, as I had never heard of them before...)
-danielle at Twilio
i didn't even bother looking--immediately opened a new tab and google for twilio's homepage.
(btw - i love contests. they're so much fun!!!)