Your team liked reviewing.
Not everyone,
not every day,
but enough.
People read each other's work
because they were curious,
and because finding something
felt good.
Then the queue grew,
and someone had an idea.
Points.
One for every review,
three for a bug found,
a leaderboard
in the team channel,
a prize at the end of the quarter.
For a month
reviews doubled.
They got shorter.
Approved, looks good,
one point.
The quarter ended.
The prize was given.
The leaderboard
was quietly switched off.
And reviews fell
below where they had been
before any of it started.
In 1973
Mark Lepper, David Greene and Richard Nisbett
went into a nursery school
and found the children
who already loved drawing with markers.
Some were promised
a Good Player certificate,
with a gold seal and a ribbon,
if they drew.
Some got the same certificate
as a surprise afterwards.
Some got nothing.
A week or two later
the markers were put out again
in free play,
with no award in sight.
The children who had drawn
for the promised certificate
drew far less
than the other two groups.
About half as much.
Nothing had happened to the markers.
Something had happened
to the reason.
Drawing had become
a thing you do to get a ribbon,
and with no ribbon on offer
there was no reason left.
It is called the overjustification effect.
A big review of the research
in 1999,
more than a hundred experiments,
found the same pattern.
Rewards you expect,
for simply doing the task,
undermined the wish
to do it for its own sake.
Specific praise
did not.
So before you attach a reward
to something people already do,
ask why they do it now.
If the answer is
because it is interesting,
a scoreboard
is a way to buy that
and pay with it.
Thank people for the review
that caught something.
Say what it caught.
Make the work itself better,
smaller pull requests,
clearer descriptions,
so reviewing is worth the time.
And if you must count,
count the queue,
not the people.
You can pay for effort.
You cannot pay for interest
without spending some.
– Serguey Asael Shinder
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