Around 1985 I was living and working at home in Los Gatos, CA, when I got a call out of the blue:
"Hi, I'm Robert Hetkämper from German TV. We are doing a report on Silicon Valley software companies. Could we stop by tonight and interview you?"
I was nobody you'd have ever heard of, but I had a business phone line listed under my company name, Software Wizards. So I guessed that was how they found me, or that maybe it was just a prank.
I explained that the company was just me working at home, and Robert said, "This is interesting, we are looking for unusual companies like that. Do you have some friends or colleagues you could invite over and we could talk with them too?"
So I called up a few friends and asked them if they wanted to be on German TV, and bless their hearts, they all came over. I still thought it might be a prank, but then the film crew showed up and started putting lights on the street for an exterior shot.
My friends and I sat around the living room table talking, and Robert asked if we could get some glasses of water to drink out of, to get a bit of visual activity in the scene.
That was the day I learned that in a very dialog-heavy film, it helps to have the characters holding something. :-)
When the incentive to finish a goal shifts from the innate satisfaction of completion to a fear of financial penalty, is it possible that the goal itself will unintentionally change in subtle ways?
its called the Token Economy Problem. tl:dr; using tokens as an external motivation mechanism transfers away from buidling internal motivation. (e.g.,$5 for each book a kid reads gets a kid to read books for $5 bills and not for love of reading/imagination/thinking. $5 tokens run out? Kid stops reading.)
This seems to assume that a developer necessarily hits an MVP in PHP faster than in other languages. This might be true when comparing with the tooling/dependency nightmares of JS/NPM, but a half decent Python dev can get a Flask app up and running in about 15 minutes.
I read the post as saying that PHP self-selects the kind of developer that is great at making an MVP, thus why so many companies and projects are written in this garbage language. I don't think the post intends to implies that other languages are slow to develop, just that their developers are.
I have been working at a standup desk for about the last 10 years. To combat fatigue, I add a walk around the room every 20 minutes. This system has mostly eliminated all aches and pains for me.
