More personal engagement with projects: Working on a project which you helped select as one of the highest value in the whole space seems extremely rewarding. Working on a project with an extra degree of removal—ie one that an overall high value org thinks is the highest value of their projects—seems much less so. (more on the possible tradeoffs of developer autonomy below)
I don’t understand this point. Are you assuming that the low-bono model is one where the developer has no input into which projects they work on? (eg because the company overall will always prioritize whichever orgs will pay them the most, or whichever org has the highest status). Naively it seems like having clients (as opposed to donors) should not limit developer autonomy much until the demand for tech work equals supply (which as you’ve illustrated will take a long time).
Yeah, I probably overstated this difference. Developers at a low-bono agency would surely have some autonomy, since they know their own strengths better. I could be way off, but my intuition is still that a) the barriers to both applying for funding and evaluating applications are sufficiently higher that there’d be substantially more free work—that was actually worth doing—than paid work (Peter Slattery’s given some nice further examples in a comment here though YMMV about high value these are) and b) the incentives from higher pay will be quite dominant over those from higher perceived value.
I don’t understand this point. Are you assuming that the low-bono model is one where the developer has no input into which projects they work on? (eg because the company overall will always prioritize whichever orgs will pay them the most, or whichever org has the highest status). Naively it seems like having clients (as opposed to donors) should not limit developer autonomy much until the demand for tech work equals supply (which as you’ve illustrated will take a long time).
Yeah, I probably overstated this difference. Developers at a low-bono agency would surely have some autonomy, since they know their own strengths better. I could be way off, but my intuition is still that a) the barriers to both applying for funding and evaluating applications are sufficiently higher that there’d be substantially more free work—that was actually worth doing—than paid work (Peter Slattery’s given some nice further examples in a comment here though YMMV about high value these are) and b) the incentives from higher pay will be quite dominant over those from higher perceived value.