Skip to content

Latest commit

 

History

History
56 lines (47 loc) · 3.97 KB

Motivation how to.md

File metadata and controls

56 lines (47 loc) · 3.97 KB

Give specific, frequent, strategic praise on something great they did Give feedback on their work (millennials want it more frequently) Remind them of their impact & purpose -Autonomy: the urge to direct our own lives -Mastery: the desire to get better and better at something that matters -Purpose: yearning to do something larger than ourselves. E.g. hospital janitor as “embassador” or “promote healing by creating sterile places”

Demotivators

Formalized annual review (as opposed to frequent feedback) esp. self-written reviews Hierarchical/rigid titles “Distinguished” “n+1 shithead” problem Solutions handed down from the top in a “review board” Stack-ranking is organizational cancer Mandates that only X% of org can be top performers Self-fulfilling prophecy Leads to organizational jockeying Incentivized to not work w/ good people, so you look relatively better Non-technical management Don’t understand “unknown unknowns” Quality / Functionality / Schedule (and you can’t sacrifice quality) Leads to poor estimates → death-marches Ex-technical management Management needs to stay technical Help w/ debugging, stay off critical path Balancing arrogance + humility Forget that nothing’s easy Autocracy “Because I said so” never works Instead, show engineers the problem Inability to focus & Dilly-dallying Learn to say “no” Get consensus or punt

  • Ben Northrop - The 3 Motivational Forces of Developers | http://www.bennorthrop.com/Essays/2013/developer-motivation.php Business Motivated: Driven most by a desire to get things done for the customer; have a can-do attitude (even when a little push-back might benefit the system's architecture). In terms of code, they think more concretely, and aren't always the best at creating abstractions that support re-use or other non-functional goals. They just want to get 'er done and see a functional product. Technology Motivated: love learning new things for its own sake; eager to find the newest framework, language, or methodology and will take every opportunity to try it out on their current project. Know all the trending technologies, and have probably dabbled with them over nights and weekends. On a greenfield project they thrive, but when the field turns "brown" and new code turns into legacy, they look for greener pastures, or possibly worse, look for ways to shoehorn in technology even if it's to the detriment of the system. Problem Motivated: Hard problems excite these developers, independent of whether what technology is employed or even it adds value for the business. It's all about the puzzle. Coming up with an elegant, clever, or quality solution is the victory. While their solutions are solid, sometimes the details slip. Each has strengths and weaknesses, and will contribute to the project in different ways, and in different parts of the life-cycle. e.g. when starting a new project, technologists inform us about what framework or library could be most useful When the team gets stuck in the weeds of over-analysis, we rely on the get 'er done's to just dig in and start delivering working code When a problem is particularly thorny and needs to be thought through, we look for the problem solvers to step back and find a way out of the swamp.

  • Building and Motivating Engineering Teams – The Startup – Medium | https://medium.com/swlh/building-and-motivating-engineering-teams-24fd56910039

  • The Keys to Employee Retention | https://getlighthouse.com/blog/employee-retention