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> 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 th

> 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.

koonsolo 5y ago
> 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.
hypertele-Xii 5y ago
> In a company, employees needs an incentive to work together and be constructive. Isn't the incentive getting paid?
- kqr 5y ago
  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.
  - echelon 5y ago
    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.
    - kqr 5y ago
      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.
  - odshoifsdhfs 5y ago
    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.
- Ntrails 5y ago
  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
  - toomanybeersies 5y ago
    > 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.
    - taeric 5y ago
      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.
- ElViajero 5y ago
  > 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.
- MattGaiser 5y ago
  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.
- goodpoint 5y ago
  > 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_psychology 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.
ermir 5y ago
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.
ehnto 5y ago
> 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.
- thn-gap 5y ago
  > 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.
  - kqr 5y ago
    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.
    - andreilys 5y ago
      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.
toomanybeersies 5y ago
My incentive is that my coworkers aren't my enemies either.
Philip-J-Fry 5y ago
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.
ska 5y ago
> 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.
webmaven 5y ago
> 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'.

koonsolo 5y ago

> 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.

hypertele-Xii 5y ago

> In a company, employees needs an incentive to work together and be constructive. Isn't the incentive getting paid?

kqr 5y ago
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.
- echelon 5y ago
  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.
  - kqr 5y ago
    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.
- odshoifsdhfs 5y ago
  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.
Ntrails 5y ago
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
- toomanybeersies 5y ago
  > 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.
  - taeric 5y ago
    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.
ElViajero 5y ago
> 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.
MattGaiser 5y ago
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.
goodpoint 5y ago
> 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_psychology 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.

ermir 5y ago

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.

ehnto 5y ago

> 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.

thn-gap 5y ago
> 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.
- kqr 5y ago
  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.
  - andreilys 5y ago
    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.

toomanybeersies 5y ago

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

Philip-J-Fry 5y ago

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.

ska 5y ago

> 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.

webmaven 5y ago

> 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'.