That survey feels like the sort of thing I've filled out to get a temporary free trade publication subscription.
But what's interesting to me is that my current situation has enough twists to it that I literally could validly answer with several different conflicting choices on a number of those questions.
So... I'm not going to fill that out - doing so would induce too much stress against my internal need to be accurate in my answers.
At Berkeley they are doing exactly that. If you've ever seen the movie "At Berkeley" there's a scene where the university president discusses that very issue, the University of California system cannot hope to match the salaries offered by the private universities. It would be instructive to go over the list of who stays and who decamps to Stanford.
Company I used to work for did this. They held raises/bonuses down to the point we all knew we were underpaid. Entire software engineering team turned over in 18 months. They hired 1-2 year experienced developers replacing all of us who had 8-12 years experience at the company. Take a guess at how that department is doing now.
> My latest data shows that 76% of HPEs are not primarily motivated by money. But why?
When you come across a peculiar result, "But why?" shouldn't be the first question you ask. Maybe more like "What have I missed? What am I not accounting for? What am I conflating or grouping together? What assumptions did I make, and did I allow my respondents to make any implicit assumptions?"
Did the author ask what the cutoff is for money? Is it non-zero? Is he suggesting that his data shows that 76% of HPEs would rather be starving artists with great recognition? Or is there an implied "gobs of money" that's already on the table? I'm guessing the latter.
There is no acknowledgement that "not motivated by money" and "not motivated by more money" are two very different things. The way he phrased the question, there's no way to parse out what's implied. He simply asked:
> Are you motivated more by mastery of skill/craft, or motivated more by earning money?
Lots of people may answer one or the other for very disparate reasons.
> The mysteries are hard to explain.
Or maybe the author crafted the same poor questions that usually fill these surveys. The data he gathered is probably useless.
There are no profound mysteries here. Just the average tea leaves reading.
> an HPE’s connection to their trade resembles more a mysterious spiritual illumination and growing devotion than it does an evolution of practical decisions aimed in a concise direction.
My understanding is there is actual behavioral research on some of these kind of claims. An entertaining video (which does note that money is not completely irrelevant. After certain point it is just not that important motivating factor)
Yes. Whenever you're collecting feedback from a person (or group of people), their own self-image and ego is by far the most important factor in their responses.
It would not even be considered a lie by most. There's just not necessarily any relationship between their self-conception and reality. People are terrible at assessing their own motives (and from this arises marketing, whose goal is to program the target to believe they desire a specific product/brand).
Most people do not see themselves as greedy, and I would guess the respondents to this survey are not in dire financial straits, so they wouldn't make an exceptional circumstance override for themselves (assuming they're the type who'd take such a survey seriously enough to consider that in the first place).
The question, essentially, can be interpreted as "Do you consider yourself noble or non-noble?" Of course, most people consider themselves noble.
This same ego-driven self-narrative is the reason that someone can take a lot of hollabaloo, dress it up in gaudy language, throw in some charts and equations to support the pre-conception, and get people to believe it's insightful and credible.
Can you not lie (in the sense of not being honest, not in the Smullyan's sense) to the question "are you motivated by money"? If I answer no, regardless of the truth, I open myself to be treated unfairly compared to people who answer yes.
I imagine that lots of people who say they aren't motivated by money would also leave their company for more money.(some for a little more money, and some for a lot more money)
Leaving for more money is not the same as not being motivated by money. If they can make more money for doing the same/similar work it's a matter of weighing any tradeoffs (relocating, potential job stability, etc.) In fact, those variables will be the ones affecting whether that's "a little more money" or "a lot more money".
Assuming there aren't other issues - "make more money for doing something you're already doing" is a no-brainer option to take without having any ties to the motivation of their work.
I enjoy what I do and spend time improving myself not out of motivations for a raise (though that'd still be nice) but because I want to improve myself and enjoy it. But if I was offered double my current salary it'd be tough to refuse. If offered triple my current salary - my bags would already be packed.
Alternative headline: "76% of HPEs are paid well enough to not be motivated by money"
I think what this idea really misses is that there's a difference between being intrinsically motivated by money and being motivated by as a result of one's current financial situation.
I guess. But if we're taking stabs at conclusions, you could also say something like:
"Only 76% of high performance employees feel they are compensated adequately [enough to no longer be motivated by money]."
Suddenly we're writing an article about how a quarter of high performers feeling like they're getting a raw deal, instead of writing about transcendental work.
> Alternative headline: "76% of HPEs are paid well enough to not be motivated by money"
At least in my case, it's more that I'm willing to accept investment in human capital (my skill set growing) in lieu of cash. I do expect that investment to pay off in future returns of some sort (job security, future salary).
Ah, yes. The mysteries. They are indeed hard to explain if the author is illiterate in Economics, like most people are (which isn't something to be ashamed of)
Fortunately for us, the mysteries are easily explained by taking a sophomore course in intermediate microeconomics and reading over just 1 lecture:
> More realistic case: labor supply curve bends back (substitution effect dominates at low wage rates and income effect dominates at high wage rates)
It turns out that most people start valuing things other than money, ONCE a certain level of wage has been reached. Other studies suggest that the level is somewhere around $70,000, with corrections for the cost of living. No mysteries here at all, and probably one of the more solved and trivial problems in Economics in general.
a very important point is that 70k point is probably very variable, but exists somewhere in everyone except for the truly exceptional billionaire types.
personally i always need a sports car because i'm a gearhead, so maybe mine is a bit higher, but it surely is there.
> There is no acknowledgement that "not motivated by money" and "not motivated by more money" are two very different things.
Not only that, but also, I think, personally, I am more motivated by fairness rather than by specific amount of money. I could imagine myself working for 30% less with no complains, but if you're going to give that slacker over there a 10% more than what I get, I will be unhappy.
Curiously, this never appeared in any questionnaire that I had to fill in asking about my motivation.
And note to the author: Please, don't "optimize corporate environments for the High-Performance Employee", in fact don't optimize at all, just let the people who know what they are doing to work. I am sure there is a more useful way you can contribute to the society.
Another thing, if you believe you can get paid for high performance, then money is the effect and not the cause. Work that doesn't allow you to maintain your skill level will cut off your future earnings, regardless of whether it is high or low pay in the present.
It's not explicitly stated but reading this I get the feeling the idea of "trade mastery" is centered around the individual when reading this post. Personally the most significant developments in my career and skills have been when working with others who are better than me. For me that means finding a workplace with skilled individuals who are capable problem solvers in their own regard (their own specialty and methods - with overlap of course). Second to that, and only by a very slim margin is that in such a workplace I would want be working on an interesting product/ service.
So prefacing this with the fact I am currently on a good salary. Would I take a pay cut to work in somewhere where I am more closely surrounded by superlative talent? Fuck yes I would.
Money isn't everything, but it sucks being poor. The older I get, I'm finding money is more important. Between the costs of college savings, retirement savings, medical savings, you'd better be paying your high performance employees well. They may like their work (like me), but money still talks.
Regarding the medical savings it's a race to the bottom for employer provided benefits. I no longer have dental insurance at a Fortune 50 company. Medical insurance has increased 3x and now it's essentially a catastrophic plan with $10k max OOP. Far cry from 10 years ago. I put $600/month into HSA for a family of 4. Been doing this for several years and still can't save up the $10k. The damn OOP is now higher than the max HSA contribution.
Whenever I do get a raise, it just goes into another expense for some other benefit that has been cut.
$17k/yr 401k max * 2 people = $34k
$12k/yr edu savings * 2 kids = $24k
$7.2k/yr HSA contribution (that's a fucking car payment).
I can appreciate what you are saying, esp with health care.
However as I grow older I find money matters less to me (and not because I have a lot of it), I would just much rather ENJOY my craft. Crazy deadlines, horrible tech debt, bad management, are all things I have been thru and do not wish to repeat.
I'm sort of experiencing that now, and not in a good way. I'm out of work ATM, and so when I work on something technical, I work on it because I want to and when I want to.
I have found surprising pleasure in having the luxury of stopping progress at an interesting point, and exploring what's around what I'm working on, because I have the time and I'm not required to produce a certain thing by a certain date.
For example, yesterday I followed my nose on control characters, the history of which are absolutely not important for or relevant to what I'm working on. Even though I'm old enough to know, I didn't know that the null character was used as a spinning no-op to give electro-mechanical teletypes time to return to the home side. Right there in 'man ascii', the very first character has a history, that goes back to the 1870s (Baudot), or even the 1600s if you like Bacon.
My guess is that you've crossed the threshold where you have enough money to get by. For me, money matters significantly, remains important, and will do so for the foreseeable future.
I have bills to pay, food that I need to eat, transport to buy so that I can get to work, but my job doesn't pay enough for all of the above. If I could be paid for my value to the company, I would be in your position. (I train all the staff, a decade's experience working with the poorly designed systems and badly installed hardware. I help the senior staff do their work when everything goes to hell because the IT guys wouldn't do their jobs properly.) Instead, I'm expected to do all this for free - so, I've just started disappearing when it hits the fan.
I would much rather enjoy what I do, but since it doesn't pay enough for me to survive, I have little choice in the matter.
The thing that's so weird about a Late Capitalist society like the U.S. is the amount of time spent ritualizing inequality into a quasi-religious phenomena. The lower classes have no desire for wealth, but instead an ascetic mastery of whatever lot the divine order of the market has handed them. Meanwhile, our gilded class of saints must be free and untroubled by worldly concerns(mostly taxes), so they can harness their benevolent energies towards curing the ills of we small mortals. I guess it makes sense given our history of religious nuttery, but I never expected to live in such a "mythical" world.
Why would high performing employees with office jobs be "lower class"? As others mentioned once you hit a certain income threshold and job security, then you can start prioritizing the parts of the job you enjoy. This is who the article is talking about.
This means keeping a $60k job instead of sacrificing your happiness for $90-100k.
That's hardly quasi-religious phenomena. It's a luxury of skilled people living in a western society.
If anything it's the result of the push back against capitalism, such as the type of comment you just made. We're all told since we're kids to do what we love. And to since the late 1980s this anti-consumerism Fight Club-style mantra has been pushed hard to the point it's basically mainstream now, which is why marketing is so hard these days, even kids see through ads and demand authenticity.
The primary issue of inequality is largely the result of the fact that ~90% of recent job growth since the 2008 recession has been temporary/contract jobs, with little job security. These aren't the type of people who are valuing 'mastery' over money'. Middle class job growth is largely dead. And big incumbents dominate markets and global economic systems push wealth to a few. Entrepreneurship has also declined recently. There's plenty of reasons.
I don't suspect it's some cultural, original sin, type of thing that we should all feel guilty about.
>Why would high performing employees with office jobs be "lower class"? As others mentioned once you hit a certain income threshold and job security, then you can start prioritizing the parts of the job you enjoy. This is who the article is talking about.
Because they're foolish enough to believe that themselves in solidarity with the oligarch class, when really they're only temporarily useful to them.
If you think "high-performers" are part of the elite or are going to escape from this neo-feudalism unscathed, well, enjoy this sermon.
>Because they're foolish enough to believe that themselves in solidarity with the oligarch class, when really they're only temporarily useful to them.
Not everyone takes the Marxist view of society in which we're perpetually locked in a class struggle, with enemy classes and those with which we're "in solidarity".
I don't think it makes any sense to call that a 'view' - other than the trite philosophical sense in which everybody's worldview is their own. Not sure what part of Marx's analysis of class struggle would actually depend on personal opinion in any meaningful way.
Absolutely. Every single day of my 40 years (no doubt this experience is strongly connected to having been raised in poverty). Not confrontationally, face-to-face, or with violence. That's the whole point.
If your argument is that the world doesn't conform to any kind of Hegelianism, Marxist or otherwise, I guess I'd agree with you.
But if it's that there are no such thing as classes of rich and poor people, or that the former has not persecuted and exploited the latter for its own gains, now and in the past, that seems to fundamentally misunderstand history and human behavior.
> The primary issue of inequality is largely the result of the fact that...global economic systems push wealth to a few.
I shortened your statement to draw the conclusion faster. Global economic systems in this case are neoliberal free markets combined with capitalism. This isn't some inevitable "only way it can be done" thing, it's a political choice we have collectively made and allow to continue.
People have written books about this stuff (the field is called Organizational Behavior) but in classic Sillicon Valley fashion we have to reinvent the wheel. Higher pay will rarely attract employees, but it will prevent them from leaving. Low pay will increase the odds that other reasons (lack of motivation, work, environment) will cause an employee to leave.
"My latest survey data shows that 76% of high-performance employees say trade mastery is more important than money when considering career decisions."
"My latest data shows that 76% of HPEs are not primarily motivated by money."
It seems unwise to just assume, without even saying so, that what people say motivates them is what really motivates them. People are not actually very good at understanding their own thinking, and there are countless examples of people (sincerely!) stating that their motivations are X while their actions reveal it's really Y.
Trade mastery also equates to future money on a scale which may render quibbling over an extra ten grand of current compensation meaningless. Failing that, it at least helps secure future employment, which still translates to money.
The headline can be true, if you have financial guarantees to maintain a healthy lifestyle and also connections that ensure your trade mastery is actually employed.
If not, your psychological condition may deteriorate for the first case and your trade mastery may not have the perceived value in the second.
ha yeah none of them are to do the same job in Poland for 1/5th the wages. its like the question itself means something else to most people, in order for them to say "no" to it, but every onlooker could see a clear relationship to money.
1. Fully remote
2. Great pay
3. Developing for a platform I am passionate about (iOS)
I am fortunate enough to have all three of these things right now, but anytime I've considered making a job change, being fully remote is the requirement that continues to surface as the most important thing to me (and my wife :).
This study is suspect. First, using self-identification as high-performance is already troublesome. Second, the author never defines what an HPE is, and the most concrete specification is from this article they backlink to:
>For example, in a software or tech company they would be:
> Software Engineers
> Data Scientists
> Visual Designers
> Structural & 3-D Prototype Designers
> Narrative Developers
This certainly doesn't agree with what almost anybody else uses to define high-performance employees.
Third, the question they use to resolve this is from their survey:
>Are you motivated more by mastery of skill/craft, or motivated more by earning money?
> Mastery of skill or craft
> Money
> Other
I don't think we can draw any conclusion from the fact that 76% of the people who answered this public google form chose 'mastery'.
> 76% of HPEs are not primarily motivated by money.
"Primarily" is a pretty slippery word here. So they are motivated by money, but motivated more by mastery? In that case, how much more? Is it close?
Also, money has diminishing marginal utility. The first $50k of your salary is worth more than the next $50k, and so on. So how much are these people already compensated? If they are the top performers, chances are they are already the top earners too. How much do you have to earn before marginal mastery is worth more than marginal money?
Finally, how do you make this actionable when hiring? If you offer me more salary, I fully trust I will receive it. If you promise me greater mastery (or autonomy, challenge, better peers, making-the-world-a-better-place, etc), I will tell myself that everyone says that. Anyway, I've learned that good work is correlated with good salary, so seeking high compensation is a trustworthy proxy for seeking better mastery. As an employer, how would you answer that?
Of course there is also the question, To make his comparison, how is motivation even quantified and measured? The truth is his whole survey is suspect, but it's interesting nonetheless to see what a willing suspension of disbelief leads to.
The marginal benefit of money decreases the more money you earn. Each extra dollar earned is less valuable to you than the previous dollar earned. Eventually the costs of earning that dollar in time, stress, etc. overpower the benefits of the dollar itself.
I thought the latter part of the article did a good job of getting out of standard incentive-thinking.
Why is someone good at doing something? Maybe they've responded to incentives to develop themselves to satisfy market desires. But it seems more likely that the person has themselves been part of some positive feedback cycle of self-development. You can call that feedback cycle "passion" or "a love of the craft" or "flow" or "talent" or a bunch of things – and there probably are many distinct reasons to enter into that cycle, they aren't just words for the same thing – but in the end there was self-motivation and a personal desire for improvement. Why would that stop? If you got to be good through that motivation, wouldn't you want to keep satisfying it?
76 comments
[ 1.8 ms ] story [ 166 ms ] threadIf you have not enough, it will negatively impact job satisfaction and motivation.
OTOH if you have enough, it doesn't raise job satisfaction or motivation.
But what's interesting to me is that my current situation has enough twists to it that I literally could validly answer with several different conflicting choices on a number of those questions.
So... I'm not going to fill that out - doing so would induce too much stress against my internal need to be accurate in my answers.
> My latest data shows that 76% of HPEs are not primarily motivated by money. But why?
When you come across a peculiar result, "But why?" shouldn't be the first question you ask. Maybe more like "What have I missed? What am I not accounting for? What am I conflating or grouping together? What assumptions did I make, and did I allow my respondents to make any implicit assumptions?"
Did the author ask what the cutoff is for money? Is it non-zero? Is he suggesting that his data shows that 76% of HPEs would rather be starving artists with great recognition? Or is there an implied "gobs of money" that's already on the table? I'm guessing the latter.
There is no acknowledgement that "not motivated by money" and "not motivated by more money" are two very different things. The way he phrased the question, there's no way to parse out what's implied. He simply asked:
> Are you motivated more by mastery of skill/craft, or motivated more by earning money?
Lots of people may answer one or the other for very disparate reasons.
> The mysteries are hard to explain.
Or maybe the author crafted the same poor questions that usually fill these surveys. The data he gathered is probably useless.
There are no profound mysteries here. Just the average tea leaves reading.
> an HPE’s connection to their trade resembles more a mysterious spiritual illumination and growing devotion than it does an evolution of practical decisions aimed in a concise direction.
Tea leaves.
Exactly what I came here to comment. Once you're guaranteed to make no less than $X00,000/year, of course you'd start thinking about the work itself.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc
It would not even be considered a lie by most. There's just not necessarily any relationship between their self-conception and reality. People are terrible at assessing their own motives (and from this arises marketing, whose goal is to program the target to believe they desire a specific product/brand).
Most people do not see themselves as greedy, and I would guess the respondents to this survey are not in dire financial straits, so they wouldn't make an exceptional circumstance override for themselves (assuming they're the type who'd take such a survey seriously enough to consider that in the first place).
The question, essentially, can be interpreted as "Do you consider yourself noble or non-noble?" Of course, most people consider themselves noble.
This same ego-driven self-narrative is the reason that someone can take a lot of hollabaloo, dress it up in gaudy language, throw in some charts and equations to support the pre-conception, and get people to believe it's insightful and credible.
I imagine that lots of people who say they aren't motivated by money would also leave their company for more money.(some for a little more money, and some for a lot more money)
Assuming there aren't other issues - "make more money for doing something you're already doing" is a no-brainer option to take without having any ties to the motivation of their work.
I enjoy what I do and spend time improving myself not out of motivations for a raise (though that'd still be nice) but because I want to improve myself and enjoy it. But if I was offered double my current salary it'd be tough to refuse. If offered triple my current salary - my bags would already be packed.
I think what this idea really misses is that there's a difference between being intrinsically motivated by money and being motivated by as a result of one's current financial situation.
"Only 76% of high performance employees feel they are compensated adequately [enough to no longer be motivated by money]."
Suddenly we're writing an article about how a quarter of high performers feeling like they're getting a raw deal, instead of writing about transcendental work.
At least in my case, it's more that I'm willing to accept investment in human capital (my skill set growing) in lieu of cash. I do expect that investment to pay off in future returns of some sort (job security, future salary).
It's not that I don't care about salary anymore.
Ah, yes. The mysteries. They are indeed hard to explain if the author is illiterate in Economics, like most people are (which isn't something to be ashamed of)
Fortunately for us, the mysteries are easily explained by taking a sophomore course in intermediate microeconomics and reading over just 1 lecture:
http://mirceatrandafir.com/teaching/econ306/Chapter_05_6spp....
The important part:
> More realistic case: labor supply curve bends back (substitution effect dominates at low wage rates and income effect dominates at high wage rates)
It turns out that most people start valuing things other than money, ONCE a certain level of wage has been reached. Other studies suggest that the level is somewhere around $70,000, with corrections for the cost of living. No mysteries here at all, and probably one of the more solved and trivial problems in Economics in general.
personally i always need a sports car because i'm a gearhead, so maybe mine is a bit higher, but it surely is there.
Not only that, but also, I think, personally, I am more motivated by fairness rather than by specific amount of money. I could imagine myself working for 30% less with no complains, but if you're going to give that slacker over there a 10% more than what I get, I will be unhappy.
Curiously, this never appeared in any questionnaire that I had to fill in asking about my motivation.
And note to the author: Please, don't "optimize corporate environments for the High-Performance Employee", in fact don't optimize at all, just let the people who know what they are doing to work. I am sure there is a more useful way you can contribute to the society.
So prefacing this with the fact I am currently on a good salary. Would I take a pay cut to work in somewhere where I am more closely surrounded by superlative talent? Fuck yes I would.
Regarding the medical savings it's a race to the bottom for employer provided benefits. I no longer have dental insurance at a Fortune 50 company. Medical insurance has increased 3x and now it's essentially a catastrophic plan with $10k max OOP. Far cry from 10 years ago. I put $600/month into HSA for a family of 4. Been doing this for several years and still can't save up the $10k. The damn OOP is now higher than the max HSA contribution.
Whenever I do get a raise, it just goes into another expense for some other benefit that has been cut.
$17k/yr 401k max * 2 people = $34k
$12k/yr edu savings * 2 kids = $24k
$7.2k/yr HSA contribution (that's a fucking car payment).
$26k/yr mortgage
It all adds up.
However as I grow older I find money matters less to me (and not because I have a lot of it), I would just much rather ENJOY my craft. Crazy deadlines, horrible tech debt, bad management, are all things I have been thru and do not wish to repeat.
"Life's too short to be in a hurry" - batFastard
I have found surprising pleasure in having the luxury of stopping progress at an interesting point, and exploring what's around what I'm working on, because I have the time and I'm not required to produce a certain thing by a certain date.
For example, yesterday I followed my nose on control characters, the history of which are absolutely not important for or relevant to what I'm working on. Even though I'm old enough to know, I didn't know that the null character was used as a spinning no-op to give electro-mechanical teletypes time to return to the home side. Right there in 'man ascii', the very first character has a history, that goes back to the 1870s (Baudot), or even the 1600s if you like Bacon.
You'll have to follow your own nose to get past this link to Bacon. It's not that far. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Null_character
That isn't directly craft-building, but it does contribute to an appreciation for my craft.
Disclosure: I am not an HPE.
I have bills to pay, food that I need to eat, transport to buy so that I can get to work, but my job doesn't pay enough for all of the above. If I could be paid for my value to the company, I would be in your position. (I train all the staff, a decade's experience working with the poorly designed systems and badly installed hardware. I help the senior staff do their work when everything goes to hell because the IT guys wouldn't do their jobs properly.) Instead, I'm expected to do all this for free - so, I've just started disappearing when it hits the fan.
I would much rather enjoy what I do, but since it doesn't pay enough for me to survive, I have little choice in the matter.
This means keeping a $60k job instead of sacrificing your happiness for $90-100k.
That's hardly quasi-religious phenomena. It's a luxury of skilled people living in a western society.
If anything it's the result of the push back against capitalism, such as the type of comment you just made. We're all told since we're kids to do what we love. And to since the late 1980s this anti-consumerism Fight Club-style mantra has been pushed hard to the point it's basically mainstream now, which is why marketing is so hard these days, even kids see through ads and demand authenticity.
The primary issue of inequality is largely the result of the fact that ~90% of recent job growth since the 2008 recession has been temporary/contract jobs, with little job security. These aren't the type of people who are valuing 'mastery' over money'. Middle class job growth is largely dead. And big incumbents dominate markets and global economic systems push wealth to a few. Entrepreneurship has also declined recently. There's plenty of reasons.
I don't suspect it's some cultural, original sin, type of thing that we should all feel guilty about.
Because they're foolish enough to believe that themselves in solidarity with the oligarch class, when really they're only temporarily useful to them.
If you think "high-performers" are part of the elite or are going to escape from this neo-feudalism unscathed, well, enjoy this sermon.
Not everyone takes the Marxist view of society in which we're perpetually locked in a class struggle, with enemy classes and those with which we're "in solidarity".
But if it's that there are no such thing as classes of rich and poor people, or that the former has not persecuted and exploited the latter for its own gains, now and in the past, that seems to fundamentally misunderstand history and human behavior.
Do you feel okay in the head?
Yes, if only there were a word for someone in the middle.
I shortened your statement to draw the conclusion faster. Global economic systems in this case are neoliberal free markets combined with capitalism. This isn't some inevitable "only way it can be done" thing, it's a political choice we have collectively made and allow to continue.
"My latest data shows that 76% of HPEs are not primarily motivated by money."
It seems unwise to just assume, without even saying so, that what people say motivates them is what really motivates them. People are not actually very good at understanding their own thinking, and there are countless examples of people (sincerely!) stating that their motivations are X while their actions reveal it's really Y.
Compare.
If not, your psychological condition may deteriorate for the first case and your trade mastery may not have the perceived value in the second.
As always, it's a little bit more complicated.
1. Fully remote 2. Great pay 3. Developing for a platform I am passionate about (iOS)
I am fortunate enough to have all three of these things right now, but anytime I've considered making a job change, being fully remote is the requirement that continues to surface as the most important thing to me (and my wife :).
Third, the question they use to resolve this is from their survey:
I don't think we can draw any conclusion from the fact that 76% of the people who answered this public google form chose 'mastery'."Primarily" is a pretty slippery word here. So they are motivated by money, but motivated more by mastery? In that case, how much more? Is it close?
Also, money has diminishing marginal utility. The first $50k of your salary is worth more than the next $50k, and so on. So how much are these people already compensated? If they are the top performers, chances are they are already the top earners too. How much do you have to earn before marginal mastery is worth more than marginal money?
Finally, how do you make this actionable when hiring? If you offer me more salary, I fully trust I will receive it. If you promise me greater mastery (or autonomy, challenge, better peers, making-the-world-a-better-place, etc), I will tell myself that everyone says that. Anyway, I've learned that good work is correlated with good salary, so seeking high compensation is a trustworthy proxy for seeking better mastery. As an employer, how would you answer that?
Of course there is also the question, To make his comparison, how is motivation even quantified and measured? The truth is his whole survey is suspect, but it's interesting nonetheless to see what a willing suspension of disbelief leads to.
Why is someone good at doing something? Maybe they've responded to incentives to develop themselves to satisfy market desires. But it seems more likely that the person has themselves been part of some positive feedback cycle of self-development. You can call that feedback cycle "passion" or "a love of the craft" or "flow" or "talent" or a bunch of things – and there probably are many distinct reasons to enter into that cycle, they aren't just words for the same thing – but in the end there was self-motivation and a personal desire for improvement. Why would that stop? If you got to be good through that motivation, wouldn't you want to keep satisfying it?