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Comment by atoav | Hacker News Reader

That kind of place can draw a certain kind of employee. This finding is hard to transfer to commercial projects. Sure employees will always claim to be really motivated, especially in the marketing material, but are they we-are-nerds-working-on-the-bleeding-edge-of-human-knowledge-motivated?

Probably not, but there is surely some manager out there who made themselves believe they can motivate their employees to show the same devotion for the self-made hardships of some mostely pointless SaaS product. If you want to grab that kind of spirit, what you do needs to fundamentally make sense beyond just making somebody money.

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That's exactly how we were able to go to the moon in 55 years ago. And why it's complicated today. It was of course lot of money. But it was mostly a lot of highly skilled, motivated devoted people doing for an ultimate common goal. Money would not have been sufficient by itself.

In other words, if you permit, pure capitalism isn't a sufficiently good motive to get something significant done. But of course most of us don't work towards an ultimate common goal – and neither did most people in those times. One wonders if there is enough meaning left these days to go 'round and ensure most of us feel passionate about the stuff we (have to) do. Maybe we really need a god or war or common enemy to unite all strands into a strong rope.

Since then, a LOT of the smart motivated people have been lured into either banking or adtech. The pay is good and the technical problems can be pretty interesting but the end result lacks that "wow factor".

Fingers crossed that next century we'll look at our current banking and adtech and go: Wow - that was unbelievably sad and dumb.

I also read that nowadays we are more risk averse and many people/manager/companies are mostly administrators of status quo. Pair that with lack of vision and public engagement for current challenges to humanity.

Also, CERN does not have a profit motive.

How much good work have the people reading this thread had to trash because it didn't align with Q3 OKRs? How much time and energy did they put into garbage solutions because they had to hit a KPI by the last day of June?

> Also, CERN does not have a profit motive.

This is a great point. We work with CERN on a project, and we're all volunteers, but we work on something we need, and contribute back to it wholeheartedly.

At the end of the day, CERN wants to give away project governance to someone else in the group, because they don't want to be the BDFL of anything they help creating. It allows them to pursue new and shiny things and build them.

There's an air consisting of "it's done when it's done", and "we need this, so we should build this without watering it down", so projects move at a steady pace, but the code and product is always as high quality as possible.

CERN buddy of mine suggested that exposing a colony of physicists to elevated ambient levels of helium would trigger excessive infrastructure building behavior.

That’s a great observation, and I think generally correct, but there are private companies where that sort of motivation exists, for basically the same reason

Then they get bought by some megacorp which kills the motivation.

Or they are the megacorp that killed it (Google, Xerox?)

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