Developers have jobs for the money, right? If you want a developer to work hard, give them more money, right? Wrong. For many developers, money has little effect on motivation.
Being an odd creature anyhow, developers are a bit different in that the things most people seek in a job means little to most developers. A developer is motivated by a completely different set of factors, and I believe I’ve ran across a great definition of the things that really matter.
Rob Walling offers great insight in “Nine Things Developers Want More Than Money” – this is a great read, and I recommend it highly for both those that write code, and those that manage those that write code. For that matter, I highly recommend this for everybody, read it.
I love what I do, and I work with a great team. While it’s still far from perfect; I can say that I do love my job. For the last couple weeks though, I’ve had to remind myself of this several times. I’m sure we’ve all done it, in this industry it’s hard to avoid. You read an email or receive a phone call and repeat the mantra “I love my job, I love my job, I love my job.
For those outside of the IT field, developers are looked at as miracle workers – through us, business leaders think anything is possible (and they often see no reason why we can’t work our latest miracle by the next morning). In reality though, we do work miracles; we save companies vast amounts of money every year through increased worker efficiency and automation, we enable new lines of business that wouldn’t be possible otherwise, and reduce energy costs because we keep the office lights turned off.
When you move on to your next challenge how will those that inherit your code think of you? Noble or notorious, innovator or insane? This is a question that all developers should ask themselves frequently; though too few ever do. You should always write with the assumption that someday a new developer will take over your code, and they will question every decision and assumption you’ve made. When this happens, what will they think of you?
My employer recently completed the final audit to confirm ISO 17799 compliance, the process was a real eye opener. In a process that should have been fairly short & painless, the ordeal lasted close to a year, with me joining the company just before the second, and largest audit. That made my first few weeks rather interesting, to say the least.
While 17799 does have some complex requirements, most of the issues found had more to do with the overall mentality than with the true technical issues involved.
Productivity and efficiency have been passions of mine from a young age, I’m not sure why, but achieving as much as possible, as quickly and efficiently as possible has always driven much of my thoughts, actions, and plans. I was around 10 years old when I learned that there were people that specialised in worker productivity, which led me to researching process design, why restaurants are setup the way they are, the psychology of work and motivation, and a variety of other related topics.
