Nope. I couldn't care less about our "vision" or whatever management is calling it now. I am at my employer under a "business" relationship. In exchange for my experience, time, and expertise, I will accept a salary. Don't try to rope me into "loyalty" or say we are a "family". We aren't - end of story.
I have. If I truly believe in the "product" and am treated like I am an owner and not a minion than it is different.
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by owner, I don't mean of the company; rather the product. I find developers spend most of their time in the app and know when something works or doesn't. They can have a "hunch" when a feature is off, or the experience is wrong. being empowered to make decisions and tweaks without someone else getting upset is invaluable
I would whole heartily agree with this. I see a lack of company delegation and trust to give Ownership over to its people when those people are full well, if not more than the company, able to make the important decisions. Ownership and Owning it, whatever it may be (project, product, architecture, etc) is important to driving self improvement for people and advancing their careers. I think it is great that you acknowledge this and feel this way. I hope that your company realizes it and values your drive, opinions, and decisions.
I'm an independent contributor, a dev. I don't own my employer's business beyond some token stocks. They give me value in the form of money because I give them more value through my work.
It's ultimately prostitution, and that's OK. They pay me well and respect my time/skills, I give them 100% for 8h day. But I won't go "above and beyond" for someone else's business...
As someone also employed in a large multinational, I always enjoy the mass emails that detail the cool conventions that are being held in Vegas or <other nice locale> that thousands of my non-technical coworkers get to attend.
Attending events and networking is a great way for people to get out and change up the pace of work life and learn something new. I think that this is not done nearly as often as I would like it to happen. Especially in the tech world where things are changing at such a fast rate.
I suppose - I just find it strange that most of the IT initiatives directly support the success of a business, and when the company sends the top 10 producing sales team members to a free Caribbean trip, and buy luxury cars for others for a year I'm sure they could shell out something for other teams rather than buying a pizza or lunch every so often.
This is just an observation as well, so I could be completely incorrect in my thinking.
Its a great observation and one that I think has struck many people. I would be interested in hearing a sales person and development person put their views on the table about the subject so we could see both sides and compare motivators between the two roles.
I would agree! While I'm not looking for handouts or anything like that the email blasts (company wide) really do sort-of shove it in everyone else's faces unintentionally.
I might take action on this and ask our customers individually what they would like and compare across roles. If I sort this data I will definitely post my findings.
If I'm going to spend 40+ hours somewhere for a meaningful amount of time (1 year+), the happier I can make myself there the better. I like my co workers, my workplace treats me with respect, they're flexible, we work on interesting projects, nice office locations, a comfortable environment.
Personally I would love to travel and work remotely (building up towards that) and the flexibility and comfort for me means being able to accomplish other things in my life that I want to do while working. Like travel across the world and see new places. If there is enough trust and flexibility I could see myself doing that for the rest of my life.
Vision and mission have any significance if they reflect how the company owner
wants to live. If a company grows large enough to get the middle management
caste, vision and mission become meaningless.
I think one of the more motivating things I have seen is to understand that people are giving the majority of their time to the company throughout the day and the year. A company that can become a part of an employees life and not have its employees dedicate their life to the company is a big feat. I have seen this achieved by a company that gives proper flexibility for employees so that work fits into their lives and not the other way around. Such as when you do your work is less important than how well you do your work. Or where you work is irrelevant if you collaborate well. I think companies in general should provide more opportunities to explore and experience the world to their people than they do today.
I work for a religious university (so the pay is meh). I would say that it's the relaxed culture in IT (I can come in any time between 8-9), good benefits, and free classes.
You're supposed to use the free classes to work on your masters but I use it to take the "fun" classes you can't during a normal college run. And the boss is okay with it :D!
That is really cool! Any kind of learning experience to better yourself tends to be a really good motivator. People tend to feel stagnant and want a change if their job is the same over and over and they are not learning anything new or being challenged.
I think that mutual respect and trust between boss and you is really important to feeling comfortable with work. It is painful to see some bosses become extremely stuck in their ways and think everyone works the same way. That time working from where you want can be extremely thought provoking and provide those who need it, a change of pace.
No reason in particular, but I like it because it breaks the work-from-work week up.
The important thing is that the whole team is WFH the same day so we can depend on other days for meetings and whatnot, and nobody feels left out when they are WFH.
Don't WFH days feel the best when they're in the middle of the week? That way they break up the 'daily grind' feeling and give you the opportunity for deep work right in the middle of a weekly sprint.
Every few months we (the developers) are given a week of freedom to build/learn whatever we want (within reason). It is so refreshing, and every time I grow so much faster than when slogging along the rest of the time, and we often invent novel technology that adds a ton of value.
This is really cool! You see this more in video game companies to spur thoughts and creativity and improve each other. Do you guys team up at all ever to work on new ideas? Out of the new things you learn and build how have they benefited your career? And have they helped in your work for the company?
Most people team up. I usually spend my time exploring new technologies and new paradigms to help simplify our stack. I've been doing it for a few years, and many of our foundational services and technologies came directly out of these free weeks.
A lot of people take it as an opportunity to solve annoying problems that we don't have time to solve "on sprint".
Definitely helped my career, because I can focus on building skills that I personally want to develop, in addition to building something ambitious without worrying about failure.
Have you asked your employer to set a new project, something challenging for you in the future? Maybe they are willing to switch things up to keep you happy?
Nothing, and that's great. Something I really enjoy about my current 250 people company is how many things are not arranged properly or at all. This gives me many opportunities to step up, identify issues and address them with management teams etc.
I had the opportunity to join Facebook a couple of years ago for much better pay and moving to the Bay Area (a long time dream) but decided not to do it for mainly the reason above, as well as alignment with the company mission (which is creating a product that solves problems, not creating free services and running ads like Google/FB).
Edit: "nothing" as stated above is a hyperbole. Actually there are many things that the company does or allows that make it a great place to work. What I like most is to help improving it further.
By having an immediate boss that's very nice, knowledgeable about tech, and flexible, and gotten lucky about hiring a pretty solid group of employees.
But that only goes so far. The money isn't really where I want to be, the work isn't too interesting anymore, and I don't see much room for advancement, so I'm not sure how much longer I'll stay here.
Company vision and mission statements mean very little to me, since they're almost always meaningless crap to put on a letterhead and not much more.
Oh, also my commute is just over 15 minutes. That's nice too. I can stop by the house for lunch sometimes and see my puppy. So that helps.
It sounds like not providing a way or opportunity to advance your knowledge and career is hurting you and your culture. Do you think you would stay if your employer would provide more opportunities to work on newer projects or more cutting edge stuff?
I know for me that if I am not learning new tech or driving something that really motivates me forward every month than I become antsy and look for new things I can learn.
No, probably not. They're really not aligned with the type of work I'm trying to get back into. I'm wanting to get back into mobile or move into VR space, and they're making web and phone apps for healthcare and insurance companies. I don't see that getting aligned ever.
I am actually learning new things and working on new projects right now, that might keep me a bit longer, but not too long. I'm not in a hurry to leave, but I'm starting to reboot and refresh my knowledge in the other fields again.
I know for me that I broke off into my own side projects and contracting work that interested me. I found that being able to tackle a contract that I want or a side project that could possibly bring me some money in or teach me some new things has kept me on the tip of my toes.
Well...my big hobby right now is board game design. That's taking a lot of my free time and not leaving as much to keep sharp on programming tech (although I have been spending some time on that, just not hours a night).
I'm hoping to get my first one or two board game designs signed this year. I have a meeting with a publisher scheduled in June (hopefully more soon) and I'm trying to get everything polished and playtested for that.
That is awesome! Do you have a community within work that supports this hobby? I know that we take time to support peoples hobbies and lives outside of the scope of our product and jobs. This can be a huge motivator and brings us a lot of joy and bonding for the team. We are people first and we take pride in our different skills and hobbies supporting each other any way we can. We would love to play test a board game!
Not really, no. There's a couple of coworkers that play board games, but other than that, about the most support I get is "How are those games coming along?"
I don't actually try to talk about it that much, just in case someone gets it in there head that board games are somehow a conflict of interest with web development (large corporate environment).
But that's alright, there's actually a decent game designer scene in the region with some regular meetups, and a few friends of mine will happily help me tear apart my designs (a couple are designers themselves).
A boss with a deep technical background, who has read Peopleware and embraced it, whom you trust, who'll admit fault, and works to enable you to do your best.
A boss who can push me technically and is always helping me advance my career was huge for me. I know that has been the case with many people I have talked to. If you are not helping your team or co-workers to better themselves than they are not going to feel motivation from you.
We work from home 4 days a week, we are more than free to go run errands or something if we need to, we have the freedom to spend some time on learning or on a "side project" which could help the company, some people have even gone over on vacation time with no issues, some people start at 7AM and cut out early, others start at 10 or 11 and leave later.
As long as your shit gets done and you are available for most meetings or calls you have a lot of freedom, and in turn I'm personally more willing to put in the extra time if a project is falling behind, or a product breaks at 7PM and the guy on call could use help. And for a while it was a big reason for me staying.
Yeah, another job offered me more money, but when I needed to go take the car into the shop would I need to take a day off? Will I be able to leave early on Thursdays? Will I be punished for spending 3 hours learning a new tool when I got stuck on my main project and needed to just switch gears for a bit?
I think that this is great and you are valuing trust between you and the company. We are all adults and it is first and foremost your life and time that you have decided to spend with the company. Expectation that it is the company's time is an aggressive way to think about a salary based employment. I am befuddled by some companies that do not understand that respect and trust goes a long way towards employees life, health, and productivity too!
I've left money on the table for flexibility. I've been WFH for a long time now, and I'm far more effective than in the office. They don't mind errands, and I don't mind working the occasional evening when out of time zone calls come up. Some weeks it's most evenings till 11, but I can balance that with working out in the mornings.
Flexible work environment and schedule. WFH every Friday. Flexible start and end times. I'm typically in the office 9am-4pm, and just work some nights to make up the time, which is a schedule I prefer.
Taking time during the day or when you want can be a huge improvement over a 9-5 job. Sometimes I will work late at night if I need to get things done, otherwise I don't sweat when the work is done. This also allows me to not waste time when I know I wont be able to focus. I would rather be efficient and work when I know I am going to get stuff done and do it well.
Personally, I'd like to be given time for continuous learning, rather than having me utilised (at least) 100% all the time.
This would be a win-win, since I can keep my knowledge current and my employer gets someone with skills that our clients want. But instead, all the current management cares about is utilisation figures and overheads.
Unfortunately we see too much of managers worrying about figures and utilization rates. These numbers are not always the best to go by. We like to try and empower each other to implement ways to improve our culture and build a better workplace that can benefit us in many ways. I hope that your company can realize the benefit this can have on the whole companies morale and productivity. Empowering your people to learn and improve helps everyone.
Flexibility. Outside of pay/benefits, I feel like flexibility is the ultimate perk.
We're a small software SaaS & consulting shop. 15ish employees. The atmosphere is relaxed, and there aren't cheesy corporate posters anywhere.
On the flip side, we also don't have bean bags or an open office.
We work standard 40-45 hours/week. We stay motivated and fresh by working remotely every now and then or by taking a long weekend whenever needed.
I've been offered better paying jobs at fairly large enterprise companies... but the flexibility offered here means to much to me.
Motivation doesn't really take gimmicks. You just need to have a work environment that doesn't encourage burnout or neglecting your life outside of work.
I've come to realize that flexibility is very near the top of the list for me as well, to the point that a pay increase would have to be pretty large for me to give up flexibility.
I agree, flexibility and autonomy seems like a large roll in this discussion. I think acknowledging life outside of work is really important. Better yet work that suits your lifestyle can be very motivating.
I am. I work for a small fitness company and my main motivation is the product we're building, and what we want to do with it. That was my whole reason for joining in the first place, and it remains the most motivating thing for me.
That is the I am at my company too! It is important for me to make a difference in work culture. I think that when something that fits your lifestyle and life goals provides you the ability to do it for work, it does not really feel like "work" and it is very motivating and moving personally. I think you are in the right spot if that is the way you feel. :)
Flexible work (I can work from anywhere where I can access the internet reliably...sometimes even when not reliable, i.e. while flying), and the ability to take PTO whenever I request it without issues, even 2 1/2 weeks at a time!
There is also a lot of respect for each other, and genuine listening to what people recommend & action based on feedback.
Respect goes a long way on all skill levels. I respect those I work with and both those people and I benefit from it. With respect for one another no matter the skill level, we help push each others careers forward.
I'm an engineer at a massive media and technology company. What keeps me motivated is the freedom to experiment and develop ideas on my own, outside of the iteration's expected deliverables. We have a very open culture, where engineers can spin up production servers with the click of a button, deploy things, and tear it all down without interacting with a single approval chain or ticketing system. So that's really it outside of pay... Freedom to learn and experiment on your own is a really powerful motivator for me.
I think it is awesome that your company allows you to use infrastructure to test new ideas and learn. It sounds like they have trust in you. Do they encourage you to experiment and try new things? Are these new things ever totally different from what your company does?
I think that's where they would draw the line. Generally the "new things" are really new ways of doing things we're already doing, or may do in the future. It's definitely a gray line though.
I think a company hackathon or project week can be really cool. Team up with co-workers or just yourself that follows a topic like improve the office somehow or create an idea that can help an opensource project or improve development or another teams process throughout the workday. This can motivate people and at the end you may have something that solves a common day to day pain point for your co-workers.
free Thanksgiving lunch (where we have to listen to executives talk)
free Christmas lunch (where we have to listen to executives talk)
free Years of Service Lunch (where we have to listen to executives talk)
free Company Picnic (where we have to listen to executives talk)
free ice cream at I.T. All Hands Meetings (where we have to listen to the VP of I.T. talk)
free "Skip Over Your Boss" lunches with VP of I.T. where he gives the same answer to any question asked
free "Start, Stop, Continue" lunches with VP of I.T. where no suggestions are implemented
free "Value Stream Mapping" lunches where we plan big processes that will never be implemented
free "Operational Excellence" lunches where we plan little processes that will never be implemented
free breakfast at every layoff (where the VP of I.T. tries to explain why he laid off the best programmers)
free breakfast where Big 5 consultants explain what they will try to implement that can't possibly work
free week at Caribbean resort (but for executives only)
Sounds like you made the right decision. Also sounds like they didnt treat you like adults or People for that matter, just employees that are nothing more than employees.
The worst part is I bet they did all the "we are family" and "this is our vision" stuff at those management snoozefests.
The thing I really hate is all the meaningless catchphrases. My SO did an interview for a job paying less than market rate because of the "perks" mentioned in the ad, which they could list none of at the interview.
They also espoused "work-life balance", while simultaneously expecting her to do unpaid overtime at their whim.
She did not apply, and the job is still advertised, now two years later.
Not much actually. The pay is excellent, but it's difficult to put yourself in a situation where you can actually work on something interesting. There's not much in terms of career development, training, or autonomy. That kind of stuff happens, but it happens because you find the right people. The company has nothing to do with it.
I really like IBM's Business Conduct Guidelines [1]. I think they help to creat a culture of doing things "above board" which can avoid some major motivation killers.
Bayond that, I enjoy quite a lot of autonomy in deciding how I complete my work, and often even what work I perform. Starting a new project that I want to do is obviously more motivating than one I don't care about.
Code reviews help me stay motivated to write code that I'll be proud of rather than cheap hacks. Open Source work is kind of an extension of this.
I know you asked for "other than pay" but unexpected bonuses and raises are also nice motivation boosters in my experience.
Autonomy is huge for us and being able to do work when you see fit tends to produce better code in our case. It also fits better into our daily lives and motivates us much more. I agree with unexpected bonuses and raises can be a good motivator too, but I have seen that the effect wears off faster than something that fits into your daily life and improves it.
I also agree with the above board approach! You are spot on there. Transparency through the good, the bad, and the ugly are really important to us. I think that with transparency comes strong trust and more respect in the work place.
We like to see and feel the motivation of each other "Owning it" or taking lead and pushing on a project emotionally and with Grit. If someone becomes a driving force for a project they think is important it creates a great sense of motivation for them and others around them. It is a core value that really pushes us to be better people and better developers.
Embracing open-source. The vast majority of the code I write at resin.io isn't just disappearing into some black hole to make the company money, tied to the companies decisions and destiny. It's public, so others can find and use and learn from it, it's part of tools that will be useful for a long way into the future, even if our startup disappears, and it's transparent to all our customers and users too. If I ever want to show some future company my past work, I directly can.
It all creates a sense that my work isn't a temporary thing to solve some business problem of ours - I'm creating more-permanent and broader value, not just to resin, but also to me, and our customers, and the open-source community as a whole.
This is a great point! It is also something me and my co-workers have experienced. We love to build things that not only benefit our company and our goals but our personal careers too. Building and improving our people's careers is really important to us. Something that can be open sourced and keeps our code afloat is looked at as a win.
Money is pretty much main thing. Unless you are Basecamp and have that kind of fantastic treatment of employees, anything else is just pay and let me do my job, so control.
So, it is a question of threshold. With Basecamp you know they are committed to your wellbeing, it is not a specific perk, it is the attitude where you are certain they are with you and then you obviously don't have to think much, you can give yourself to work.
This hits home for me. Having the attitude and atmosphere like this is very important! It makes such a difference to feel that the company and community has your back. It also takes so much stress out of work and adds to excitement. Well said.
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by owner, I don't mean of the company; rather the product. I find developers spend most of their time in the app and know when something works or doesn't. They can have a "hunch" when a feature is off, or the experience is wrong. being empowered to make decisions and tweaks without someone else getting upset is invaluable
I'm an independent contributor, a dev. I don't own my employer's business beyond some token stocks. They give me value in the form of money because I give them more value through my work.
It's ultimately prostitution, and that's OK. They pay me well and respect my time/skills, I give them 100% for 8h day. But I won't go "above and beyond" for someone else's business...
Where as IT/Tech departments miss out on a lot of those.
This is just an observation as well, so I could be completely incorrect in my thinking.
I've also worked at small places. It's the same thing, I'm there for the pay, nothing else.
I'm at a small company (100+ employees) and the Powers That Be talk a good talk but don't walk the walk.
You're supposed to use the free classes to work on your masters but I use it to take the "fun" classes you can't during a normal college run. And the boss is okay with it :D!
Treating me like an adult with a life outside of work, basically.
The important thing is that the whole team is WFH the same day so we can depend on other days for meetings and whatnot, and nobody feels left out when they are WFH.
A lot of people take it as an opportunity to solve annoying problems that we don't have time to solve "on sprint".
Definitely helped my career, because I can focus on building skills that I personally want to develop, in addition to building something ambitious without worrying about failure.
I had the opportunity to join Facebook a couple of years ago for much better pay and moving to the Bay Area (a long time dream) but decided not to do it for mainly the reason above, as well as alignment with the company mission (which is creating a product that solves problems, not creating free services and running ads like Google/FB).
Edit: "nothing" as stated above is a hyperbole. Actually there are many things that the company does or allows that make it a great place to work. What I like most is to help improving it further.
But that only goes so far. The money isn't really where I want to be, the work isn't too interesting anymore, and I don't see much room for advancement, so I'm not sure how much longer I'll stay here.
Company vision and mission statements mean very little to me, since they're almost always meaningless crap to put on a letterhead and not much more.
Oh, also my commute is just over 15 minutes. That's nice too. I can stop by the house for lunch sometimes and see my puppy. So that helps.
I am actually learning new things and working on new projects right now, that might keep me a bit longer, but not too long. I'm not in a hurry to leave, but I'm starting to reboot and refresh my knowledge in the other fields again.
I'm hoping to get my first one or two board game designs signed this year. I have a meeting with a publisher scheduled in June (hopefully more soon) and I'm trying to get everything polished and playtested for that.
I don't actually try to talk about it that much, just in case someone gets it in there head that board games are somehow a conflict of interest with web development (large corporate environment).
But that's alright, there's actually a decent game designer scene in the region with some regular meetups, and a few friends of mine will happily help me tear apart my designs (a couple are designers themselves).
One can dream!
We work from home 4 days a week, we are more than free to go run errands or something if we need to, we have the freedom to spend some time on learning or on a "side project" which could help the company, some people have even gone over on vacation time with no issues, some people start at 7AM and cut out early, others start at 10 or 11 and leave later.
As long as your shit gets done and you are available for most meetings or calls you have a lot of freedom, and in turn I'm personally more willing to put in the extra time if a project is falling behind, or a product breaks at 7PM and the guy on call could use help. And for a while it was a big reason for me staying.
Yeah, another job offered me more money, but when I needed to go take the car into the shop would I need to take a day off? Will I be able to leave early on Thursdays? Will I be punished for spending 3 hours learning a new tool when I got stuck on my main project and needed to just switch gears for a bit?
It might be useful to put the company name out there, I'd be interested in learning more.
This would be a win-win, since I can keep my knowledge current and my employer gets someone with skills that our clients want. But instead, all the current management cares about is utilisation figures and overheads.
We're a small software SaaS & consulting shop. 15ish employees. The atmosphere is relaxed, and there aren't cheesy corporate posters anywhere.
On the flip side, we also don't have bean bags or an open office.
We work standard 40-45 hours/week. We stay motivated and fresh by working remotely every now and then or by taking a long weekend whenever needed.
I've been offered better paying jobs at fairly large enterprise companies... but the flexibility offered here means to much to me.
Motivation doesn't really take gimmicks. You just need to have a work environment that doesn't encourage burnout or neglecting your life outside of work.
There is also a lot of respect for each other, and genuine listening to what people recommend & action based on feedback.
The thing I really hate is all the meaningless catchphrases. My SO did an interview for a job paying less than market rate because of the "perks" mentioned in the ad, which they could list none of at the interview.
They also espoused "work-life balance", while simultaneously expecting her to do unpaid overtime at their whim.
She did not apply, and the job is still advertised, now two years later.
Bayond that, I enjoy quite a lot of autonomy in deciding how I complete my work, and often even what work I perform. Starting a new project that I want to do is obviously more motivating than one I don't care about.
Code reviews help me stay motivated to write code that I'll be proud of rather than cheap hacks. Open Source work is kind of an extension of this.
I know you asked for "other than pay" but unexpected bonuses and raises are also nice motivation boosters in my experience.
[1]: http://www.ibm.com/investor/att/pdf/BCG_C_2016.pdf (PDF)
I also agree with the above board approach! You are spot on there. Transparency through the good, the bad, and the ugly are really important to us. I think that with transparency comes strong trust and more respect in the work place.
We like to see and feel the motivation of each other "Owning it" or taking lead and pushing on a project emotionally and with Grit. If someone becomes a driving force for a project they think is important it creates a great sense of motivation for them and others around them. It is a core value that really pushes us to be better people and better developers.
It all creates a sense that my work isn't a temporary thing to solve some business problem of ours - I'm creating more-permanent and broader value, not just to resin, but also to me, and our customers, and the open-source community as a whole.
Also for anyone else, I am just going to leave this here: https://m.signalvnoise.com/employee-benefits-at-basecamp-d2d...