Comment by addicted
5 years ago
I’d argue getting a shirt for some PRs is better than the status quo, where you get nothing for a PR.
Which just goes to show how bad the status quo is.
5 years ago
I’d argue getting a shirt for some PRs is better than the status quo, where you get nothing for a PR.
Which just goes to show how bad the status quo is.
> where you get nothing for a PR
You already got payment up front: software that the author(s) have made available to you for free.
You get payment by the author spending time to review your changes.
You also get payment afterward: free maintenance for your pet feature. (Not guaranteed of course but generally the case.)
“But we obtain the puzzling result that, when rewarded, volunteers work less. These findings are in line with a large literature in social psychology emphasizing that external rewards can undermine the intrinsic motivation for an activity.”
Be very careful assuming that a payment motivates open source developers. If you offered to help me do something for an hour for whatever internal motivation you might have, and afterwards I offer you $5 for your time, you would likely be demotivated.
If you offered to help me do something for an hour for whatever internal motivation you might have, and afterwards I offer you $5 for your time, you would likely be demotivated.
On the other hand if you offered to buy them a beer or a coffee it would probably be very motivating. I'm not sure why this is. Maybe cash just feels lazy and impersonal, so the amount being offered has to be big enough to counter that feeling.
It's the implicit conversation with the beer-buyer that matters. You are offering your time (which is atleast valuable to you) along with the beer. If you just buy a beer and left instantly, it's gonna be worse than $5
1 reply →
Offering $5 dollars feels like it's ascribing a low value to the time/effort to help. Offering a coffee or beer feels like a better gesture/token of appreciation. It's not about the value then but about the gesture.
For anyone who is working, people are "giving" them $5 all the time. But they probably don't have people buying them coffee/beer/lunch all the time.
That quote might be misleading:
"Volunteer work is an increasingly large, yet ill-understood sector of the economy. We show that monetary rewards undermine the intrinsic motivation of volunteers."
-- https://ideas.repec.org/p/zur/iewwpx/007.html
The earlier sentence make it clear they are talking about monetary rewards specifically, not any kind of reward. A t-shirt might notionally have a $ value, but it is not a monetary reward. Plus, the nature of a branded t-shirt has an obvious team-participation / prestige value.
If rewards demotivate people, we should also avoid positive recognition, or praise, which is a form of reward; of course this is unintuitive, so I assume monetary rewards are a special case.
It is tricky.
We all hear the stories of the person who saves a company a million dollars, and then gets giving a coffee cup (or an attaboy) for recognition.
It gets even trickier when the giver and the receiver have wildly different incomes.
Generally I find money to be a terrible proxy for what I actually value, but other options are worse proxies!
I actually would be very motivated. From the perspective of a contributor the worst thing that can happen is that their patch gets rejected or ignored. If you get paid for something it means someone actually wants your contribution. It's less likely to be ignored or rejected outright.
http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.511....
here is the work that you cited if i am not wrong.
That's missing the point a bit.
Good PRs are valuable, but require lots of work. Spam is not valuable, but it also does not require basically any work.
Hacktoberfest equally rewards both good PRs and spam equally. With those incentives, what are people logically going to produce?
On the other hand, what kind of people are going to logically participate in an event where the reward is a Hacktober branded T-shirt? What are their likely motivations?
> what kind of people are going to logically participate in an event where the reward is a Hacktober branded T-shirt?
Well, the answer is clearly "a lot of people," unless you can think of an alternate explanation for the increase is spam during Hacktober.
Why they want a damn T-Shirt so much is a totally valid question, though. I don't understand that either.
I submitted very few PRs to open source projects. I usually submit bug reports.
In both cases I get that what I care about gets into the project. It's enough for me.