Explore your motivations and how they can affect your career trajectory.

What motivates employees?

I read an article recently that suggested the two motivators for employees are passion and purpose. They broke down passion as "getting good at a skill" and purpose as "contributing to society." I think that's an oversimplification, but still worth exploring.

Let's start by defining more clear terms. Let's say that "getting good at a skill" can be better defined as "mastery." Let's say that "contributing to society" can be better defined as "impact." It's also important to acknowledge that motivations are more complicated than these two concepts. Furthermore, they aren't mutually exclusive. I know that both things are very important to me.

Mastery

I often hear product managers, agile coaches, recruiters, and other non-developer types saying that developers value "interesting" problems to solve. For myself and many of the people I've worked with over the years, I think this is a mischaracterization. Instead, I might say that developers who care about mastery want to master their preferred stack. You can give me a very interesting problem that's in a technology stack I hate (JavaScript, for example), and I will have a hard time staying engaged for a long period of time.

What's more, this is the area where developers will spend time outside work hours, whether that's reading blogs, working on side projects, or going to conferences. If that mastery lines up with a business model, then there's a mutually beneficial arrangement, and employees will be motivated; If that mastery does not line up with a business model, that's okay, as long as employees have the time and space to learn and grow.

Impact

"Impact" has been important to me personally since before I was a professional software engineer. There's no simple definition here -- sometimes people can measure impact by the number of users reached, sometimes by tangible good done. What I can confidently say is that working on some piece of software that nobody uses is demoralizing.

I regularly see a mistake when communicating with a software development team. People who aren't familiar with code will sit down and tell the team what to do. This grossly limits potential and autonomy and leans heavily towards micromanaging. Moreover, it means you're no longer paying smart employees to do what they do well. Instead, focus on why they should build something above all else. When a team understands why the thing they're building is important, they can innovate, they can measure, and they can succeed without constant attention.

Beware exploitation

I believe that many managers don't intentionally exploit their employees. However, intentional or not, if you are a very passionate and motivated individual, you should take steps to avoid being exploited. This has been a hard lesson for me personally. At a previous job, I had a 216% utilization rate, meaning that I logged enough hours not only to cover my expense but at least one, arguably two other team members' expenses.

Find a way to strike a balance between growing your mastery, making an impact, and pacing yourself. Companies do not adequately reward your extreme efforts. Instead, you'll find that as soon as you start producing more, they expect more. This is a natural consequence of human behavior. What's more, as you start producing enough to cover other team members' you may become resentful that you do not get paid much more.

To compare to my own example, when I kept up 200% output for over a year, I got a $2,000 bonus. My efforts earned my company around $15 million over three years and probably about $8 million that year. A $2,000 bonus is a joke at that point. It's true that I got a promotion eventually and got a slightly bigger paycheck, but for all that effort, I didn't have much impact on anything except making the CEO more wealthy.

What's the best motivation?

There's no clear answer here. A combination of both mastery and impact becomes important for motivating employees. I will say that the best engineers I have ever had the pleasure of working with cared about making an impact. When those engineers became demotivated, they often said the same thing, "I learned a lot, but I haven't made any real difference."

I think to be a great engineer, you really do have to care about both. I've met people who could write great code but did not care about making an impact. I would not describe those people as "great" engineers. Some of them didn't even qualify as adequate. They mostly just stood in the way. I've also met well-meaning people who never focused on mastery. They often did things the hard way and got badly exploited by companies.

Tyler Thompson

Tyler Thompson is a Principal Engineer with over 15 years experience. He currently works as a Principal Software Development Engineer for Zillow Group. Before working at Zillow he was a Principal Software Engineer for World Wide Technology and worked across many different industries.