← Back to context

Comment by robocat

5 years ago

“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.

8 comments

robocat

Reply
dec0dedab0de  5 years ago

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.

  • NhanH  5 years ago

    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

    • dec0dedab0de  5 years ago

      It's the implicit conversation with the beer-buyer that matters.

      That is certainly a plus, but I don't think that's all of it. If I was working on something for a friend, that they had no idea how to help with. Then at some point they dropped off a snack or drink as a thank you, I would be happy about that. If they offered me a $100 bill I would be offended because they're not my boss, and my time is worth more than that.

      I want to say that a small token of appreciation feels better than having my value quantified to an insulting amount. However, it may be even more basic than that. Food is a powerful reward, there is a reason it is used to train animals. It also could be that introducing money makes something feel like an obligation.

  • pythonaut_16  5 years ago

    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.

Chris2048  5 years ago

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.

  • robocat  5 years ago

    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!

imtringued  5 years ago

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.