outbreak

I don’t think I ever wrote about motivation much here even though it’s one of my favorite subjects and was also the main topic of my thesis. Recently I’ve been thinking about it quite a lot again and I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s very important to use it to hire the right person.

Back to the beginning. There are loads of theories on motivation and most of them just cover different aspects and mostly they can all live together. One of the aspects of motivation is where it comes from. That gives us intrinsic motivation and extrinsic motivation. Obviously it’s not a boolean thing as any individual sits on a line between the extremes. And there’s also the matter of having a different source of motivation for different things. Let’s not get into that.

Intrinsic motivation

Let me quote Wikipedia on this:

Intrinsic motivation refers to motivation that is driven by an interest or enjoyment in the task itself, and exists within the individual rather than relying on any external pressure.

We are motivated by the fact that we’re getting something done and by the feeling we get ourselves when we’re done. We’re not in it so someone can tell us we did a good job. We don’t really care. A friend of mine once said: “It’s for me. If somebody else likes it – great.” We like to think that the more we get into the subject, the better we’ll be at it and the better the result. In other words no relying on luck, no shortcuts, no marketing/selling, no subpar stuff. Because of all this we don’t like when others interfere with stuff we’re responsible for.

Extrinsic motivation

Another quote from Wikipedia:

Common extrinsic motivations are rewards like money and grades, coercion and threat of punishment. Competition is in general extrinsic because it encourages the performer to win and beat others, not to enjoy the intrinsic rewards of the activity.

These people often need to be “managed” to give them the sense of direction and success and are in that way more demanding. They also need more information about what is going on and might see the successes of their co-workers as their own and be empowered by them.

Who to hire?

You might want to hire intrinsically motivated people when you don’t have the management layers to keep them motivated or you just don’t have time to do that. On the other hand it’s very hard to keep them motivated when all the fun work is gone and thus tend to either switch tasks/assignments or try to over-explore/discover. These two reasons are also why some people want to hire intrinsically motivated employees only to later regret it as they can’t motivate them anymore or don’t know how.

Hiring extrinsically motivated people might be better for cases where you can manage them properly as they might feel lost without guidance. They are somewhat easier to motivate as you have a lot more ways to do it – sometimes even just a public pat on the back suffices. They are surely a better choice for a company in an established market as they thrive on beating the competition. If you have an “employee of the month” you should hire extrinsically motivated people.

I think it’s very important to hire a homogenous team motivation-wise. An extrinsically motivated manager might have a problem motivating an intrinsically employee and the employee won’t get why his extrinsically motivated colleague is bummed that he wasn’t complimented on the great work last week.

The intrinsic problem

We intrinsically motivated have a problem. Even though that extrinsically motivated people can internalize motivation when it matches their values and beliefs it is much more common for somewhat extrinsically motivated people to become more and more extrinsic with time due to the Overjustification effect. As that means that their number will go up with time, most of us are used to just getting in to solve the problems and then get out. Somewhat ironic that it sounds like a mercenary.

I wrote the previous post on the iPad in the WordPress app and I was forced to finish it in the browser. Here’s why:

1. Writing HTML is very hard on the iPad due to extensive keyboard switching. Opening tags are hard, but closing tags are even harder (switch to extended for <, back to symbols for /, back to normal for the tag name and then to extended for >).
2. I’m missing the spell checking feature I have in my Firefox, because I usually have the iPad native checker off as I write lots of stuff in Slovenian.
3. I like adding some links automatically with Zemanta and you don’t get that in the native app.

While writing the first version of this post I also found another error – it seems that the WordPress iPad app doesn’t like &lt; or &gt; inside posts, so actually writing an HTML tag like this <a> is not possible (it crashes the app immediately).

So it seems I’ll still mostly be using the iPad for content consumption and chitchat and not content creation. And possibly scribbling down ideas.

When coding a login interface it’s common to follow this pattern:

1. POST data to a script that checks it and sets appropriate cookies
2. On success redirect to the previous (or some other) page
3. On error show that error or redirect to an error page

You do this so that users don’t get the annoying “resend data” pop-up if/when they reload the destination page. On the other hand this pattern exposes a usability issue when login data is correct but cookies are turned off.

For some reason my cookies were disabled today. That means that logging in to Twitter (that uses the previously described pattern) looked a bit weird. I’d log in, get redirected and end up on the home page again. Same thing happened on Mozilla Addons page. The very definition of recursion.

When I finally figured it out, I immediately thought of a solution. When you redirect from the post add something to the URL – that way the redirected page can check if you’re actually logged in and alert you if you’re not.

Now this has a few problems of its own:

1. It exposes that you have an account on a specific service that can be detected with history sniffing.
2. If you create a user based URL to circumvent the previous issue you might leak user information.
3. If you reload the destination page after session expired you’ll get an alert that might be wrong itself (you would have to implement some server-side logic that checks if the session has just started).

With all this in mind I still think that redirecting to a different URL is better than leaving users without any information (no matter how uncommon having disabled cookies is).

How do YOU solve this?