Posted on 18 September 2004 under General

How much pressure does the average nerd need to be productive? What sort of pressure do they need? These are difficult questions that cause consternation and heart-ache amongst everyone involved. Random comments follow.

  1. Dont create arbitrary deadlines as a means of motivating nerds. They’ll know and they will either resent you and work hard or resent you and ignore the arbitrary deadline. This has a flip-side, if your deadline looks arbitrary despite it being based upon good “fundamentals” then you are sunk. Take the time to explain the motivation and realities behind any deadline.
  2. Anyone working on a task that thinks there isn’t anything else to do afterwards will needlessly “improve” that task or slack off. This is human nature. So make sure that everyone in your team knows what is coming even if its inconvenient. Communicate people. I like to flag tasks beyond the current task as being likely to be assigned to individuals (or, avoiding the Taylorist model, available for selection by team members). This gives people time to prepare for the task (even if just mentally) and also ensures that they know there is more coming.
  3. Don’t make the situation seem hopeless otherwise an existential fugue will settle on the team. In other words, everyone will turn into a Marvin and lose all motivation. So please don’t list a few months worth of work that needs to be done in a week. This is too much pressure!
  4. What if you genuinely have a few months worth of work and only a week? Well to start with your basically screwed! So don’t think that pressuring the team will create some magic motivation dust that allows everyone to turn into a super-programmer that can work at 20 times the normal levels of productivity. Create a realistic plan - cut functionality, move the delivery date, accept lower quality for some bits*. In other words the problem isn’t how to motivate your team into a deathmarch, its how to fix the project.
  5. Some nerds, especially those prone to perfectionism, will close-down if it looks like there is too much work coming. These people are the hardest to maintain a balance with - too little pressure and they will lose all inhibitions re: perfecting things, and too much close-down!
  6. Threatening to sack (or similar) people if something isn’t achieved doesn’t really work. I hope I don’t need to explain it to you, but once the threat is made the person will act and work as if they have been already sacked. Don’t try this. If they really deserve to be sacked then sack them right, now don’t drag the team down with their sackworthiness.
  7. What if your company will go belly up resulting in everyone being sacked if people don’t work hard towards some goal. Well this probably will motivate people for a while, especially if there seems to be a reasonable chance of achieving the goal. Others will look for another job straight away. If there is little chance of achieving the goal then almost everyone will look for another job.

* NB lower quality will only work, on the off chance, that your project has space-shuttle levels of quality and is actually a use-once utility for another set of nerds - pretty unlikely but who knows?