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The Slow Decline of Highly Motivated Developers
Why developer motivation decreases and what can managers do about it?
We all have seen how motivation decreases for a once highly motivated developer, or maybe even we were that person, and from the outside sometimes it looks very clear although oftentimes for their manager it seems something came out of the blue.
Note that I said that “the motivation decreases” and not “the motivation is lost” and that was intentional: highly motivated people don’t lose motivation, instead the motivation is no longer on the work they are doing for their company but believe me, they are still motivated in other areas and probably they are already thinking of moving on.
How does this happen?
It starts with hiring. If you ask a hiring manager what they expect of their new hire, most (myself included) will say they way motivated, self-driven people, who want to solve problems and improve the product they will work on.
And what does very often happen after they are hired? They can’t work on solving the problems they see because it’s not aligned with the company’s priorities (which in my experience are not well-defined and change periodically), ideas are shut-down because there are “urgent” things to do, and proposals to…
