Top Motivators For Developers (Hint: not money)
lessonsoffailure.com
lessonsoffailure.com
I've also found that technical people need to have adequate playtime. Ideas are exchanged and expanded while they play ping-pong or walk around the parking lot. Allowing people the freedom to wander when they need to returns high rewards that far offset the apparent lack of focus. Technical workers work all the time. Their minds are constantly mulling over problems and possible solutions. What looks like slacking off may be the most productive time they spend. Give them the freedom to work."
-Judy McKay, author of Managing the Test People
I'd honestly, like those that I work with to understand and recognize me as an individual with tastes and needs that may or may not be like any other member in any other role in a project.
"I'm not!"
-- Oscar Wilde
-- Oscar Wilde"
(ellyagg, 2010)
As to whether or not your company should be scaling, that's another matter.
What the author means to say is "It is commonly believed that X is generally a good motivator. While sometimes true, there exist some professions (ie. much of software development), for which the reality is more subtle, and Y actually motivates people better", where X is various rewards (ex. financial) and Y is different opportunities for autonomy, mastery, and purpose. But that wouldn't fit in a title, so you get a simple generalization, with the deduction of specifics assumed to be an exercise for the readers.
1. By and large, it's a meritocracy. Your degree matters a lot less than the quality of your code.
2. Two people in a garage can still make an impact. Most other technical fields require large teams and big budgets to explore.
A single good developer can make a huge impact and seeing my work make a big difference in the everyday lives of other people is my primary reward. Nothing is more demotivating than being mired in an awkward bureaucracy that resists any change or improvement.
It takes balls to be a chemist.
Personally, having sweated a high-paying job for "the man" for a few years and feeling increasingly burdened by it, I was a bit surprised by the number of upvotes for comments about money being the most important factor. I would happily take a pay cut for an opportunity to develop expertise and to take control over my work. (Which, in a sense, is what entrepreneurship purports to offer -- along with high blood pressure.)
Pay is another aspect of recognition.
(Unfortunately from what I can tell, the studies on how different kinds of motivation [intrinsic, tangible extrinsic, social, etc.] relate are all over the map, and appear to depend sensitively on the specific kind of task and setting.)
Either by practise, or by some self-hypnosis-like trick.
"They don’t care about money, actually, unless you’re screwing up on the other things. If you start to hear complaints about salaries where you never heard them before, that’s usually a sign that people aren’t really loving their job. If potential new hires just won’t back down on their demands for outlandish salaries, you’re probably dealing with a case of people who are thinking, “Well, if it’s going to have to suck to go to work, at least I should be getting paid well.”
That doesn’t mean you can underpay people, because they do care about justice, and they will get infuriated if they find out that different people are getting different salaries for the same work, or that everyone in your shop is making 20% less than an otherwise identical shop down the road, and suddenly money will be a big issue. You do have to pay competitively, but all said, of all the things that programmers look at in deciding where to work, as long as the salaries are basically fair, they will be surprisingly low on their list of considerations, and offering high salaries is a surprisingly ineffective tool in overcoming problems like the fact that programmers get 15" monitors and salespeople yell at them all the time and the job involves making nuclear weapons out of baby seals."
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/FieldGuidetoDeveloper...
So far my impression is that the bitterest pill for me to swallow would be having no chances. If I come up with a great idea, I won't benefit. I assume here that the usual corporate "bonuses" are not even worth talking about. Salary raises tend to be < 10%, which hardly makes up for inflation. Boni of a couple of 1000 bucks are also not interesting. A flat costs 200000€ where I live, so 3000€ here or there don't make an essential difference (being able to buy a flat as one example of relevant income metrics).
Therefore I wonder if employees are even the best choice for corporations, as likely they will never give the company their best effort.
Sure, in an ideal world, I would only be motivated by doing interesting things. The corporation would take care of the rest of my life (enough money for rent, health insurance, family etc), so that I could focus on my job without another worry in the world.
First flaw: what if I lose my job? Corporations don't pay enough for me to build a safety cushion of money. So I'll have to live in permanent fear of losing my job. Living in permanent fear is neither healthy nor fun.
Second flaw: my idea of being motivated by doing interesting things died pretty soon in my first job, during the dot.com area. That is when they brought in the consultants, a ka people who where paid three times what I was paid, got assigned the interesting tasks, despite often being less skilled. Now my tasks back then weren't that interesting, either, but I am pretty sure the experience would have demotivated me, no matter how cool my tasks would have been.
Doing interesting work can factor into my earnings estimate (ie instead of having to invest two weeks of my private time, I can learn technology X on the job. Fine - so that is maybe worth one quarter of my monthly salary, as a one time payment). So if you offer me interesting things to do, I might consider working for you for slightly less money.
Sounds like the parent commenter is making excuses.
So to survive for a year, I would need 24K of savings. It takes several years to build that up with a normal salary.
To pay for a house or flat, most people work 30 years where I live. And that is with 50K they pay in cash in the beginning - which I don't have, as I don't have rich parents. It takes several years to save 50K with a normal salary. I haven't worked as an employee for a while, but there are taxes to be paid, social insurance, pension plans and what not (mandatory where I live). I think with 60K, maybe < 10K would be left over per year. That's not counting iPads, new Computers, car, whatever (meaning I won't be able to save all that). Also, the pension plan is supposed to be worthless (they've been saying for years that the system will collapse), so I'd have to put some money into a private pension plan.
As a freelancer, I was up to 80K savings in about 3 years (sadly, since then severely reduced, but still).
Yes, you can live comfortably as an employee - as long as you don't lose your job for 40 years.
The logical conclusion is to start your own company.
I live in the US, make an average salary for a software engineer, and live an incredibly comfortable life. I'm not going to retire at 30 or own a private yacht, but life isn't the dickensian struggle you present.
I never had to think too much about expenses as a (single, childless) programmer here in Vienna (which is not known for very good developer salaries).
Looking at other programmers here it seems my experience is not out of the ordinary.
Sounds like a very exceptional situation.
Also, how old are you? I think when young, one doesn't really have a feeling for how much money one might need in the long run. Alone, I don't need more than maybe a 30m^2 flat. I don't crave any luxuries (except a fast computer+internet). Once family enters the picture, things might change dramatically. Suddenly you need a 4+ bedroom flat, a car, finance your kids education etc. Also, the older you get, the more you realize that you need savings for old age, good health insurance, and you might not be able to always work as hard as you used to.
My burn rate is about 18k a year.
When earning 35k Euros per year I managed to save a bit less than 1/3 of my nett salary (taxes + social & medical insurance added up to about 30% (not counting tax refunds I got at the end of the year), which I think is lower than I would have payed in Germany).
I've since quit that job and my most recent offers have been for 45k euros a year.
I did try to start my own 1-man shop (and failed) with the money I saved while working, my savings lasted for about a year (actually it could have lasted more, I didn't deplete all of my savings - I did get unemployment benefits during that time tho).
Higher education is mostly free in Germany, too, but students still need to live somewhere and eat.
Savings rate might go down with family, too.
As I said, I have lived OK so far, too. I just don't feel it is possible to get very far in terms of financial independence and security being employed.
That should cover the bulk of your expenses if you live frugally in Vienna (I lived for about 800-900 euros a month as student).
Regarding getting fired - you don't seem to take unemployment benefits into account (~55% of your salary after taxes, probably the same or similar in Germany, state also pays your medical and social insurance in that case).
This should also cover the bulk of your expenses - so the amount you need to save is a lot lower then you think.
I'm not saying working as a programmer is your ticket to wealth and fame, but come on: you'll earn a significantly higher than average salary and you won't be promptly thrown to the wolves if you get fired.
The Germanic countries have fairly extensive social safety nets and at the end I really don't think such a level of worrying (about financial security) is justified (btw you also pay less taxes if you have children).
People earning far less than either of us raise families and buy homes here (and in much poorer countries) just fine.
They are equivalent to a bit under $50k and a bit over $60k.
Being a decent software engineer, your raises can outpace inflation pretty handily though I'm pretty sure I'm not managing 10% annually over my career. My salary is 2.3 times what it was when I started, about 12 years ago. My calculator widget thinks that's about 7% annual increase and I'm now living much better than I did in 1998, despite living in a more expensive area.
I'm earning 8 times more than I did when I started, also 12 years ago (six figures now). Though to be fair, I didn't have a degree when I started and began in tech support.
I haven't payed medical insurance since starting to work (as the employers pay them here), but when I did the cost (for plain vanilla public medical insurance, which in Austria covers pretty much everything in my experience) was a bit over 20 Euros a month.
I suspect a lot of Germans are not consciously aware of how much health insurance costs, because the employer pays half of it. So they would think they only pay 300€ for health insurance, when in reality they pay 600€.
The government decides what goods to put into the "standard basket" to calculate the inflation. They can choose goods that make inflation numbers seem good.
Yes I know it is usually not 10% (although we might still be in the middle of an economic crisis - Greece, one of the Euro countries, just going bankrupt). I am not sure if a typical salary raise is 10%, either. I am pretty sure that with salary raises alone, you won't be making significant headway as an employee (your company won't upgrade you from 50K/year to 100K/year). The only way to earn more is typically to switch jobs.
I never had a contract that said "salary will be raised by 10% every year", it was just a number I took out of thin air.
http://catb.org/esr/writings/homesteading/homesteading/ar01s...
the society of open-source hackers is in fact a gift culture... in which the only available measure of competitive success is reputation among one's peers.
But I think that only applies to open source, not to what we do for a living.
Hey guys: it's not anarcho-socialism, it's science!
- W. Somerset Maugham, 'Of Human Bondage'A decent salary + big performance bonus or a high salary and no bonus? Even at the end of the year, if they were equal it is my thought that a decent salary + large bonus would seem more rewarding, psychologically. Thoughts?
Really, who would prefer (X-10)+p*(10) where p lies between 0 and 1 over X?
Unless you have it locked in, very explicitly, in writing - fuck the bonus, give me higher base.
I worked at a company with a bonus scheme, which seemed groovy in the first year I was there.
From year 2 till year 5 (when I quit), I did not see even a whiff of a bonus, despite knocking my perf. reviews out of the park. It was always canceled because of some external factors.
Surely they aren't the best motivators, but I'd argue that they do more good than harm.
Why? As I get older I am less and less capable of sitting in front of a computer screen all day: I just get antsy and want to go outside. I'm not afraid of hard physical work: I live on a small farm and there are plenty of chores to do every day. If I could be paid my current salary to do something where I didn't have to sit under fluorescent lights all day I would really think seriously about it.
It's demeaning because what you're really saying is "I shouldn't have to pay for creative work, since money is for important people like me."
We start caring at the 20-50% level, but not about minor differences. Even then, it's not always worth it to get bothered by it. It's mildly irksome to see utter douchebags, at the same age and with not 1/10 my level of talent, making $500k in private equity for literally no good reason, but I can't do anything about it and it doesn't directly affect me (except via New York's absurd rents, but that has more to do with government mismanagement of the property market) so I don't really care enough to think about it that much.
Thanks!
Finally, the underemployed and parentally funded (trust fund kids) should not be allowed to drive up the rents. (The fact that they ruin the city is an ancillary annoyance.) This can be accomplished by making it illegal to pay more than a certain percentage of one's after-tax salary (say, 40%) in rent.
It would have also prevented the multitude of overpriced (and undersold) condos littering that area - along with the empty lots that were going to be overpriced condos before the bust.
Near as I can tell, this would drive up the price of rentals quite significantly. Any landlord would need to factor the risk of getting caught being a landlord into your rent.
I like your second idea of punishing people who are not part of my tribe.
By the way, a more realistic way to lower rent prices would be to end rent control. One could also move the projects out to distant brooklyn/queens, and rent the projects out at market rates.
Fail on my part. I meant to apply this to ownership without renting, with the intention of kicking out the damn speculators.
By the way, a more realistic way to lower rent prices would be to end rent control.
The original rent control regime (where rents couldn't increase with inflation) turned out to be a huge disaster. It left a bunch of well-connected non-productive rich white people with an arrangement better than ownership, at the rest of our expense. The concept of rent control I don't have an issue with, but the original implementation was awful.
I don't mind government interfering with the rental market if all tenants benefit. In a city like New York, government meddling is necessary because the free market fails catastrophically, as we see in these four-digit rents, but I do think the 60+ year-old sweetheart deal that some people have, just because they've been here forever, needs to be ended.
What you're actually talking about is presumably a perceived injustice, which might anger people if they felt it was undeserved.
If we're playing poker together, I'm motivated more by fun than trying to actually get your money. That doesn't mean if you take my money by cheating I wouldn't get upset.
Smart people also like money to a certain degree, because the more money you get the shorter amount of time you have to be someone's bitch. So it's all 4.
Word split fail for me. Picking the right domain name is so hard. And yet it seems so obvious once you've integrated it in global word reading zone...