On Wed, 16 May 2012 08:35:26 +0200, Per Jessen wrote:
That might be true. OTOH, even with mentoring, stuff is complicated and hard to get on speed with. You often have to work hard to find something out, improve it, become an expert on. Thats exhausting. Why would you do that? Because you personally want it or because people say "wow - how cool, thanks!". I think that is the main motivator. And I think we don't do that often enough.
Praise is an important management tool, but it has to be sincere, and that is difficult to bring across in email. It also works best coming from a superior. Praise from ones peers is a lot less effective.
Depends on the situation - peer recognition can work very well (and in an OSS project, it's peer recognition that helps build the meritocracy that's present in most projects). As a motivator, though, yeah - for example, on LKML, praise from Linus probably motivates most people more than praise from me would. :)
Nonetheless, you've got a good question here - what is the main motivator for people to take part?
Daniel Pink's book _Drive_ provides some pretty good insights into what motivates people to act. It's probably not completely comprehensive, but I found it to be quite instructive.
I tell you from my personal experience as the author of Hermes: The number of people saying something positive about Hermes to me is a little of fraction of the number of people ranting nonsense. And - interestingly enough - the less clue people have the more they rant.
And how many people actually did something useful to Hermes for example instead of just talking? You don't want to know... How motivating is that?
Personally speaking, one word of praise easily outweighs any negative ranting.
I think perhaps an underlying commentary to Klaas' message is that often times we don't even know about peoples' involvement in various systems (or for that matter that the systems are there or what they do). I've found over the years that in general, tech people often aren't good at trumpeting their accomplishments. Part of the reason for that is, I think, something I personally refer to as "SME syndrome" (SME = Subject Matter Expert). When one knows something well enough to the point of it being second nature, one tends to think there's nothing special about the skills and/or knowledge involved. I've seen countless SMEs who have very poor self-esteem because they think "anyone could learn this". Of course, that's not a ubiquitous thing, either. I've also seen plenty of SMEs who are rightfully (and wrongfully - usually because they're not the SME they think they are) very proud of their achievements. :) Jim -- Jim Henderson Please keep on-topic replies on the list so everyone benefits -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org