Ask HN: Salary Allocation by Task Attractiveness?

[mittermayr]

This is a bit of a weird question, but recently, talking to other developers a lot about it, we came to the conclusion that it's fun to work on new things and it often sucks to work on maintenance type of tasks.

This is also why hiring developers during a prototyping phase seems often easier than to keep them on board later down the road (a year or two in), when most tasks shift over to 'keeping the product running and adding fixes and small features'.

So, I was wondering whether anyone had experience with or heard about schemes where you would allot a developer budget for the month, but distribute payments (within ranges) on how 'popular' a certain task/implementation/work-package is.

For instance:

20% of developer budget is allocated to the necessary new things, like trying out a different DB system, infrastructure experiments, iOS prototypes, bayesian sentiment algorithm, crawler, etc.

80% of developer budget is allocated to fixing the admin panel, writing a report-generator for traffic/ads/sales reports, fixing DB issues, rewriting/revisiting code that keeps causing troubles, etc.

And then have developers self-assign (where possible) to which work they'd like to focus on/contribute to. When you want to make a bit more money that month, maybe accept helping out with 'more boring tasks', if you feel like you need a bit of a break and just want to experiment with new things, accept that this month you might be making a bit less.

Basically, looking at it from a different perspective, how do you make sure that the very core thing most of us devs love the most, i.e. 'trying out new shit until we've figured it out' stays a solid part of your daily job while at the same time, making sure all those maintenance things get taken care of responsibly?

just an odd idea, would love to hear your thoughts.

[hapless]

If the payments are big enough to make a difference, people will crawl over bodies to earn the bonuses and feud viciously if/when they don't get assigned the bonus-bearing tasks. People will become reluctant to work on the low/no-bonus assignments.

If the payments aren't big enough, then no one will care and nothing will change. You'll pay money for nothing, and workers will be even unhappier to work on some tasks, since the real stinkers will be identified by the attached bonuses.

Fundamentally, in the professional world, we rely on employees' intrinsic motivation to get jobs done. It's well understood that reward systems that tie money too closely to work damage intrinsic motivation, so there has to be a really, really good reason to attempt it.

[mittermayr → hapless]

in a situation where salaries are somewhat fair and necessary funding for this is a given, I'd say you're absolutely right, people will understand there's fun and not so fun work to do, but at least you're being paid well for all of it.

but in situations where regular salary financing is tense (especially startups who are bootstrapping, or use private funds, or very little seed money), I feel people are more willing to accept less-than-industry-standard pay if the work is fun at least (of which there is only so much in a project). this is why I was trying to figure out whether someone ever transformed this into a salary distribution model.

[hapless → mittermayr]

I misinterpreted your proposal because distributing SALARY this way was too plainly insane.

No one with a brain in their head would work for you on that basis. The feuding would start immediately and never end.

You cannot make software development into piecework.