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Tips for Startup Companies
- herdrick 20y agoGood advice when he sticks to things he knows. Inexplicably he throws in a 'here's a book I read, maybe it's OK' section. Excerpt: "...you need to [measure] achievement and make that measure available to the worker so that he or she can motivate himself (for a computer programmer in a software company, components of this measure might be 'number of bugs fixed, with extra points for the severe or tricky ones' and 'pages of documentation written...' Good lord. Read what Joel Spolsky (and everyone else in the world, it seems) has written about the perfidity of measuring the "output" of knowledge workers with punchcard goals, not to mention the effect on morale of 'motivating' your workers like you would motivate a lab rat. Here's more: "...people don't do what you tell them to do; they do what gets them a reward." There's even a Dilbert strip on the subject. Yikes.