Ok, more than a cry for help, I want to know what motivates people in the technology industry.
Some of you may say…”Oh, it’s obvious. We’re in the coolest industry of our time.” or “Um, have you seen these gadgets lately????”
But, I think there’s more to it than what initially fires our neurons.
Quote of awesomeness…
Unfortunately, you can advertise in all the right places, have a fantastic internship program, and interview all you want, but if the great programmers don’t want to work for you, they ain’t gonna come work for you.
That’s from the first line of Joel Spolsky’s post titled “A Field Guide to Developers“.
If you think you have this problem then READ the article.
ParticleTree.com has some brilliant writing and information that should be read on this topic as well(and many other topics).
http://particletree.com/notebook/on-motivating-programmers/
This awesome video has a good explaination that kind of falls in with Joel Spolsky’s view.
Jason Fried of 37signals has an interesting outlook on this idea of motivation as well.
So what are some things that motivate us?
- Make money a non-issue. Salaries don’t have to be extravagant.
- Give us a real purpose and direction.
- Try your best to make us comfortable(Chairs, noise, etc).
- Attempt to reduce destructive politics and micro-managing.
- Don’t burn us out, we do that on our own.
