motivation-techniques

Is there any working bonuses-schema for developers?

Any suggestion how financial bonuses for developers should be calculated. It seems to be easy -- take things like: effectiveness/performance, code quality/bugs count, experience, teamwork, engagement, Over hours, some others. and count some score. But we all know (i.e. http://gojko.net/2008/08/07/paying-programmers-are-bonuses-bad-a...

How to Keep Your Developer Team Educated

I work in a consulting services firm. We do most of our work in the Microsoft tech stack. Over the last 5 years I feel like my team as REALLY been inundated with new technologies. These days we need competencies in not just a few, but MANY technologies and it really helps to be deep in them too! I feel like we could all use a little hel...

How to keep business support team motivated?

In the course of my career I've noticed that developers working on new functionality are, as a rule, more cheerful than these assigned to troubleshooting and fixing bugs. Good tips on keeping business support a happy? Organising business support in the way that team's morale isn’t hurt? ...

How do you stay motivated on long projects?

We're in the middle of a fairly large-scale bespoke project for a Client. With almost a year gone, and another year at ahead before the final phase is pegged for delivery... well its a little difficult to stay motivated all the time. I try to alleviate it a couple of ways. Pet Projects & nixers Reading & Education & keeping up to spe...

How to persuade people to contribute to an open source project?

I know there are a number of successful open source authors here. We develop a relatively successful open source project (I won't say what at the fear of spamming). Now gradually, after about 3 years the number of developers has slowly increased, but they tend to turn up sporadically, write some code, then leave forever. The nature of t...

Are programmer incentives a good idea?

I would like my programming team to be more productive and it has been suggested that the way to achieve this is to provide incentives to make them work harder and / or longer. Does anyone else work in an environment where bonuses are offered for completed work? And if so, does it help? It's been suggested that an Xbox or Wii could be...

How do you TEACH best practices?

I work with a bunch of people that write sloppy code. I mean things like defining variables in multiple places, tightly coupling code, etc. I am not an expert but I have a willingness to improve. It seems the people I work with are completely fine with what they are doing. How can I motivate them to improve? I can't offer any incentives ...

Gumption source for programmers

Many times I find myself working on a project with very little rewards. These projects tend to take the wind out of my sails. To overcome this there is a few things that sometimes works. Some of my favourites are writing small graphical applications or to clone an old game. Actually anything that gives quick, visual results will work fo...

Unit Testing and motivation to do so

I'm currently Unit Testing an application that isn't build to support unit testing very well, lot's of dependencies, refactoring and the developers who build the application didn't think of unit testing when they started developing. My job is to do research for unit testing, unit test the application and bring unit testing into the organ...

what do you do to motivate yourself

what do you do to motivate yourself to program. sometimes I know I should program but I am a procrastinator so I read about how people invented stuff or read about how some programming or math concepts came to be (history). My question is what do you do? ...