The 10-minute talk at the end mentioned a prerequisite, almost as an aside, to the learning on motivation: pay people enough to take the issue of money off the table.
My experience is that it is the very rare company, even among startups, that thinks of compensation in this way or otherwise meets the prereq. It explains the somewhat extreme sentiment I've seen here on HN of "screw you. pay me." on the topic of motivation and engagement.
When what I do[1] can easily save twice my salary, as a side effect, it's surreal to be negotiating an extra 10%. These days, I just quote an acceptable salary range when asked, despite the negotiating disadvantage. More often than not, it succeeds in filtering out wastes of my time.
To some degree, perhaps not fully consciously, it's also been a test. Assuming the initial need filter is passed, how hard my reasonable asking price is pushed back on is a measure of how much my contribution will be valued.
[1] Assuming I'm actually needed, and not just wanted, perhaps as overkill.
It is a tough choice, especially when you're pre-VC... since at that point you have a few hundred thousand, and you want to build a solid small team while keeping your runway long.
Once you've raised a Series A round, though, then you should be going for quality over quantity and paying people what they want (within reason). Since at that point it still is about runway but you probably have significantly more cash to play with (a couple of million dollars). I don't think being too cheap at that point makes a lot of sense. It is interesting that pg and a lot of YC startups are taught to be cheap, but there's a fine line between cheapness and efficient use of capital.
I don't care how much you pay me, you'll never be able to recreate the incredibly satisfying feeling I get when demonstrating mastery within my community of peers.
On SO people's desire to "demonstrate mastery" can often turn into "make people think I'm awesome at any cost". I have ~500 points, so am not a total SO rookie, but quickly stopped answering any questions because you can be guaranteed someone with a worse answer will get voted up if they get it in first and make it sound authoritative.
Admittedly, this seems to have gotten better in the last few months from the threads I've seen, but early on I made a laundry list of totally erroneous "best answers" and it was just depressing.
Writing awesome content on your own site and getting links from Reddit, Hacker News, and the like is far more rewarding in the end than plumping up someone else's content site, if you have the faculties, time and resources to do so.
One thing they've done to reduce the "fastest gun" problem is disable accepting an answer within a certain time frame after a question is posted. Also, answers with the same vote count are randomly displayed rather than ordered by order of posting.
One problem: "writing awesome content for your own site" ≠ "getting links from Reddit, Hacker News and the like"
Also, useful solutions to simple common problems don't tend to be very good linkbait. Do you really think anyone on Reddit or HN will link to a blog post on the practical differences between id and NSObject* in Objective-C? It will get lots of votes and help a lot of people on Stack Overflow, but the Internet as a whole doesn't care.
Basically, I don't have the time or inclination to play the stupid blog promotion game, so I may just as well spend my time tutoring the bathroom sink. By contributing to Stack Overflow, people will actually be able to find the information I write.
What really turns me off to StackOverflow is how much the ads flow into the content and are really difficult to ignore. I know that they've got a user-base that needs some extra coaxing to look at ads, but it really diminishes the site's utility, and fundamentally I think this sort of thing should be an open repository of knowledge like Wikipedia.
Thanks for pointing this out. If you're using StackOverflow and are annoyed by the ads, consider giving back to the community and voila, no ads! I would estimate that it takes ~5 answers to hit the 200 points you need.
I don't particularly agree on SO, but on Reddit - totally. I frequently click on the ads there because advertisers seem to make the effort to make them fit into the gamut of typical Reddit links (because most advertisers are Reddit users, I guess). The "open source" ads on SO are good, but there needs to be more of a "users are the advertisers" revolution going on across the Web.
My experience is that it is the very rare company, even among startups, that thinks of compensation in this way or otherwise meets the prereq. It explains the somewhat extreme sentiment I've seen here on HN of "screw you. pay me." on the topic of motivation and engagement.
When what I do[1] can easily save twice my salary, as a side effect, it's surreal to be negotiating an extra 10%. These days, I just quote an acceptable salary range when asked, despite the negotiating disadvantage. More often than not, it succeeds in filtering out wastes of my time.
To some degree, perhaps not fully consciously, it's also been a test. Assuming the initial need filter is passed, how hard my reasonable asking price is pushed back on is a measure of how much my contribution will be valued.
[1] Assuming I'm actually needed, and not just wanted, perhaps as overkill.