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Comment by pm215 | Hacker News Reader

Personally I find being asked to engage in introspection like "reflect on a time when you were motivated at your job" pretty demotivating. I'm terrible at it, and it's a huge timesink with negative associations to things like interviews and having to write up annual performance review text.

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For me, talking with my client over Slack or Skype about the task works. Suddenly some uninteresting thing defined only by a JIRA issue becomes something more. Some feature which provides real business value with context.

That's one of the reasons why I work where I work, because PMs don't stand between us and the clients.

Sounds circular. Maybe you need to be motivated to think about what drives you. Catch 22.

All the more to my point. You’d have a pretty crisp answer if I asked you in a 1:1, what motivates you. No need for the introspection.

But, you can’t expect your manager or anyone to know that about you unless you’re willing to share it. A good manager will understand this is demotivating and work within those boundaries. But, unfortunately managers aren’t clairvoyant, so we do need to hear it from you :)

Yeah, no, I wouldn't. I might at best have a vague idea of what might be motivating. Like I said, I don't do introspection -- I could tell you if I'm happy or not happy at work, but if the answer's not happy that doesn't mean I know why.

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