A former colleague recently started his postdoc in computer vision/robotics at the GRASP lab at the University of Pennsylvania.
On his google+ feed, he put a picture of students competing in a “robo-hockey” tournament. One comment good-humoredly asked, “Are they working? Or just playing?”
The comment was of course written in jest. We all know that we are most productive when the work is both enjoyable and challenging. But, it got me thinking. Can mundane day-to-day grind be made fun?
I think it can be. Not always, not easily, but definitely sometimes.
The first example that comes to my mind is when I was a graduate student, majoring in Aerospace Engineering. I was part of a research group developing software to aid the design of fuel nozzles and injectors. The software predicted the fuel spray characteristics for a given nozzle geometry, and the conclusions had to be experimentally verified.
A fellow student and I were tasked with conducting the verification experiments. Each nozzle configuration had to be painstakingly assembled, mounted on a rig, tested by sending a blast of water (in lieu of jet fuel!), and the resulting spray had to be recorded for later analysis. There were many different combinations to test, and the process was slow and tedious.
Out of boredom, my friend decided to record how long it took us to do each experiment. This simple act inadvertently changed the dynamics of the whole project. As we tried to improve on each run of the experiment, the process had turned into a game, and our boredom melted away.
Another example is from a few years later. I was working as an algorithmic trader, and I had written software to process market data from a derivatives exchange. Our server was hosted by our broker in a new rack that they had co-located with the exchange.
The problem was: I was not receiving any data. I was confident that the problem lay with the broker’s setup. Our server was the first in the new rack, and it made sense to me that they must have configured some switch or router incorrectly. Similarly, the broker’s engineer (let’s call him AK) was confident that the problem lay with my software.
Situations like these lead to a dead-lock. Each side waits for the other to fix their stuff, and progress is delayed. I didn’t like the delay; I wanted to trade, and I couldn’t till this was resolved. What to do? I was so confident in my own analysis, that I decided to bet a bottle of Champagne on it. AK accepted the bet.
I lost the bet! But, it was the best 50 dollars I could have spent. The bet changed everything. It created incredible energy, enthusiasm and momentum. AK procured a spare server from somewhere, loaded it with third party software, drove over immediately to the data center around 40 miles away, set it up identically as our’s and powered it on. Lo-and -behold: data started flowing to his server.
Once I knew the problem was with our setup, it didn’t take too long to isolate and debug it. While I would have preferred to win the bet, I was happy never-the-less.
Gamification works!
thinktradepray 