Pat Farrell wrote: Yes, the only way I've ever seen folks get motivated to doing the "unglamorous/unpleasant/boring/miserable stuff" is to pay them. And sometimes that isn't enough. Software developers are rarely motivated by money. They all want to do the cool stuff.
I think you need a carrot and stick: forcing the employee to do the occasional necessary grunt-work, while giving rewards for it, and managing things so that nobody has to do _all_ grunt-work. As to the money, I kind of like both, and I'd bet there are a lot of people with the same preference. My only point here is that sometimes I see people conflating "open-source" with "all or primarily volunteer". This doesn't have to be the case (as IBM, amongst others, has shown). I didn't claim that. With tiny teams, sometimes adding developers helps. But it is never without cost, and adding people only works if the tasks are suitable for parallel development, and if the people are good. Agreed. But it's not _that_ hard to find good people, and since slimserver's development is already heavily parallelized, I would think that it could absorb more people into it from SD, esp the roles that open source volunteers don't typically enjoy. But the Mythical Man Month speaks the truth. Adding people to a late project makes it farther behind. Agreed, mostly (caveat below). But I'm not sure I see how that is relevant. Nobody here is talking about adding 12 more developers to make the next arbitrary date for a release, as far as I can see. I've never seen a case where adding bodies helped. Adding talented and motivated folks, sure. There is a difference. Yep. When I spoke of adding bodies, I meant good ones: I was the primary developer on these projects, so it would have hurt me rather than helped me if they were stooges. Why would _anyone_ want to add untalented/unmotivated people to a project? -- totoro squeezebox 3 -> mccormack dna .5 -> audio physic tempo 4 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ totoro's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=5935 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=32904 _______________________________________________ discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/discuss
