I stumbled across this link the other day. I’m sure its probably been passed around virally before, but I really enjoyed it and wanted to share it.
http://blog.ferrogate.com/brilliant-animation-about-work-salary-and-mot
The central thesis is basically “money/salary is a disincentive after it covers cost of living.” And then it goes to explain that “autonomy, mastery & purpose” are the big contributors to motivation once you get past basic money.
This is pretty damn jaw-dropping. Money is a disincentive! I love it!!! Its soooo true. When I give raises & bonuses it almost never equates to improved performance. I wish I had been more scientific about it, I wouldn’t be surprised if it resulted in decreased performance.
At Peek we do not have a normal office culture.
1. We are supremely spread out and living the virtual-office dream. The dev team – Paul is in Bangalore, I am in Toronto, Nick is in New York, Yan in Nanjing, two guys in Long Island City, one guy in south Brooklyn – only Nick is in our central “office”, everybody is remote.
2. We recently switched to no central product management role (6 months ago). Basically the developers have a huge amount of autonomy in choosing what is next and then implementing it.
3. There are regular “hack days”, where folks on whatever they want. We usually go hang out somewhere different (like @nathanfreitas ’s old secret lair in Brooklyn… until he sold out to Manhattan).
4. We have extraordinary purpose:
-Drive down the costs of data devices & data – we hate carriers ripping you all off and we hate the extreme rip-off of Apple/Google and their $400 devices. Drives me nuts.
-Make data/the internet far more accessible in remote countries – internet penetration is still really globally low
-Make the internet more efficent, its extremely wasteful in bandwidth for the sake of development convenience
I will say that from when we switched from a culture of “strong product management” to “independent autonomous developers” we saw a massive swing in productivity in the dev team (including myself). When the problem of “what to do” become your own, when you became the “master” of the product… people suddenly started caring a lot more. Bug fixes started flying once they no longer went through the juggernaut matrix of a modern product development prioritization process. Once the developers were master of their own domains they really wanted to improve what they were working on, it has become their baby if you will. Just today Paul checked in some major code clean-up, with some amazing re-factoring that will make our code far more maintanable. All of that was from his own ‘to-do’ list, vetted by nobody.
I actually think the idea of 9-5 and an office is dumb. People should have autonomy in self-prioritizing/organizing their days. Its hard for me to think about working in an office now that I work from home and am at least 10x more productive. I probably work 2-3 hours longer per day due to convenience of my laptop just being there. When I think of a problem I can sit down and solve it right then and there. And sometimes life is more important. Like this morning. I had an emergency of epic proportions – my three month old son was really cute and playful. It had to be taken care of… that was more important than logging on and writing some code 
I’ll probably bang out a 14-16 hour day today and its far easier doing that now that I’ve had a fun session with my son and had breakfast with my wife. I don’t have the baggage of ignoring my family over my head.
So management and our classic work culture can be the problem. It flies in the face of classic management philisophy, but I have now seen it and lived it and believe it. Autonomy and ownership result in a drive for mastery and quality. Purpose pushes that even further. Then you are flying…
New Peek 1.10 Release – Buy it here and use PEEK110 for our special launch promo.
Mark Bowytz | 17-Jun-10 at 9:07 am | Permalink
Your article reminded me of the posting up on Coding Horror (http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2010/05/on-working-remotely.html)and also on the same site http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2010/06/the-vast-and-endless-sea.html which also links to the awesome money/motivation/autonomy/mastery presentation.
This may be my burnt-in corporate brain working here, but how is communication handled? Any regular “call-in” meetings? Occasional face-to-face meetups?
To me (again, corp brain going) any time when I work with developers not in my office if things just “happen”, it’s not always serendipity.
Rudolf | 17-Jun-10 at 9:11 am | Permalink
Sounds like socialism/communism and worker self-management. The worker owns part of their means of production and part of the product they produce. That makes them feel like they’re more than a resource to be used by management.
Related to that is 9-5. I’d like to see how much work you get done vs someone else in a 9-5 position. It may seem like you have to solve a problem right now, but there are always delays in business anyway, in some other part or piece of work to be done or in dealing with other people.
CL | 17-Jun-10 at 11:09 am | Permalink
“I actually think the idea of 9-5 and an office is dumb. People should have autonomy in self-prioritizing/organizing their days. ”
Completely agree. I have a cube and it’s useless to me (doesn’t help I am by the espresso machine people congregate around non-stop all day). Also agree on the kiddo emergencies. I have a 2yo and being able to WFM in the mornings is priceless. A family bfast is way underrated.
As a Enterprise Software PM I don’t disagree with what you say about your situation. You’re not stiffled by process and granted the freedom to creatively solve problems. At the other end of the spectrum you have immensely inefficient processes across many teams that inherently introduce miscommunication and misinterpretation. Unfortunately, for large scale business systems I do think the process is a necessary evil.
Thanks for the link. I’ve been checking in on your blog since I activated my Peek (usually looking for beta news or what’s coming down the pipeline). I hear you are enjoying amazing weather in Toronto. I’ve been out to Mississauga a number of times for work. I enjoyed sneaking away to Oakville or some of the foodie destinations in the city proper far more than fighting with Dev about what level of detail a Requisite Pro requirement should be written at.
Best Regards!
dan | 17-Jun-10 at 11:58 am | Permalink
Mark – we live on Skype. We are in constant communication, all the time. I have a zillion skype windows all the time. And there is a constant group Skype chat with all of us devs in it. Cracking jokes about each other’s moms, fixing servers, figuring out problems, etc. And one weekly meeting.
CL – we have a huge system with major reliability requirements. We have process, we just don’t have meetings. We basically deploy small but often and love unit testing.
Also tools are super duper key here. Easy deploy/rollback.
And virtual pair programming is extremely useful.
I could go on… I’ll do a post on this at some point…
Donald Dwoske | 17-Jun-10 at 12:50 pm | Permalink
“I’ll probably bang out a 14-16 hour day today and its far easier doing that now that I’ve had a fun session with my son and had breakfast with my wife. I don’t have the baggage of ignoring my family over my head.”
You lost me there. How anyone can “bang out a 14-16″ hour day and still get enough family time is beyond me… I’ve not figured it out. Do you work hours early morning or late at night when the kid is asleep?
dan | 17-Jun-10 at 1:20 pm | Permalink
today both…
dan | 17-Jun-10 at 1:35 pm | Permalink
Actualy Donald, one more point.
You know all the crappy shitty around the cooler discussions people have with folks they don’t really care about at work. Replace those 10 minute interludes with being able to play with your kid and talk to your wife. Replace the lunch alone at McDonalds with lunch at home with kids and wife.
And then replace the 2 hours of commuting with 2 hours of working, my workday is roughly 2 hours more efficient just cause I’m not commuting and ironing clothes (and umm… showering on some days).
Thats how you can balance work and life and work long days.
Scott | 17-Jun-10 at 2:24 pm | Permalink
It’s interesting that your perception is that you “give raises & bonuses” through your pure personal generosity, as opposed to employees earning raises and bonuses through hard work, or even to stay competitive because we are in an inflationary period where the cost of living continues to rise due to government printing presses.
Also glad to see that you have committed, for your lifetime, to donate all earnings and income you make above sustenance level to charity.
Lukasz | 17-Jun-10 at 6:08 pm | Permalink
> I wish I had been more scientific about it, I wouldn’t be surprised if it resulted in decreased performance.
Check out this TED talk: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rrkrvAUbU9Y
FerroGate » Comments from Peek on my Money vs Autonomy/Mastery/Purpose | 18-Jun-10 at 5:59 am | Permalink
[...] Comments from Peek on my Money vs Autonomy/Mastery/Purpose June 18th, 2010 by Martin I actually think the idea of 9-5 and an office is dumb. People should have autonomy in self-prioritizing/organizing their days. Its hard for me to think about working in an office now that I work from home and am at least 10x more productive. I probably work 2-3 hours longer per day due to convenience of my laptop just being there. When I think of a problem I can sit down and solve it right then and there. via geekypeek.com [...]
sid | 18-Jun-10 at 9:40 am | Permalink
It makes sense that developers who have autonomy would get more done if they have a to do list. But, where does this to do list come from — for a dev, it would come from their own product experience and the code. Additionally, I think customer feedback is critical, and there’s always some analysis needed to figure out what would make the product more popular. Blogs and social media is providing some of this information since influential customers flock to them, but it can’t always be scientific. Getting a sense of the competition and the market is also important to figure out what to develop. The engineer’s bias about what would be cool Vs what the market needs is bound to creep up in a large team of developers, no matter how talented.
That said, “product management” isn’t nearly as exciting or intense as the development process — setting priorities, time lines, and continuously measuring progress can become tedious. Strategic road maps are a fun exception because they present an opportunity for individual expression to the product manager, and perhaps an uber-collaborate roadmapping process with the dev team ought to be the end of product manager’s role. At least after the first market release, product managers might want to be as hands off as possible, and focus on periodic market and customer analysis and biz dev that can open up new possibilities for the dev team.
I wonder if it’s in deed possible to turn the typical product management role into a purely external facing role that feeds into the weekly meeting, and provides the developers a lot of autonomy on what they can/ want to do first. In a start-up, I’m sure the senior management will always have a point of view on what the top 3 priorities for the company are on all days and weeks and smart developers ought to be able to figure out what comes next from those.
(My entire comment applies to competent and motivated developers who believe in team work and test their stuff thoroughly before checking stuff in. Such folks are rare. For the typical developer, the typical product manager suits well.)
dan | 21-Jun-10 at 6:54 am | Permalink
Sid – my counterpoint to engineer’s bias is that everybody assumes the product manager sees the product through some magical lens of “customer view”. 99% of product managers don’t and don’t understand whats involved to get customer insight. So instead then the “to-do” list gets filled with pet projects and whoever screams the loudest wins. Well – you don’t need a product manager to handle that for you.
Having sat on both sides of the table, but mostly on the product mgmt side my whole life, I thoroughly question the need for dedicated product mgmt until you are a much larger organization. I’d prefer to spend that money on user design specialists (which is generally what I see tons of product managers end up doing anyways in startup-mode).