The paradox of motivation
Few weeks ago out of curiosity I decided to run a survey about motivation at work for software developers.
I chose this specific segment because I have been working with developers half my life, I think I know them relatively well and the market for them is extremely hot. It’s very hard to be without a job if you have some experience with coding (and you want to have a job in software development).
The results from my small research projects (the sample was about 45 developers) surprised me at first: they survey results pointed to “Total compensation” as the first motivator in order of importance for a job.
One third of the respondents put it at the first place as you can see from the graph.
Anything else came after that (17.8% for both Autonomy and Self-development, 15.6% for Projects content, 8.9% for Technologies and even less than that for Purpose of the company).
There is a lot of research that has gone into this topic (if you want a good book loot at Drive from D.Pink) and most of it points to three other main motivators: Autonomy, Mastery and Purpose.
Autonomy is “our desire to be self directed”.
Mastery is “the need we have to get better at what we do”.
Purpose is “the desire to do something that has meaning and is important”.
I was expecting to find results that were somewhat similar to this. But if you look at the overall “Money” is first and “Purpose” is last.
I thought this was due to the small sample size so I looked for more data and I found a report from StackOverflow that pointed to the same things as job motivators.
Money is indeed a strong motivator for developers.
How come?
How do they dare saying that the most important thing for a software developer is Total compensation?! Are they different than anyone else?
After reflecting a bit more I think that this is not soo far away from the research conducted at MIT and other universities and, no, developers are not a race apart :)
Compensation is indeed the first thing most of us think about when thinking of a job: we can easily compare a higher salary to a lower salary, we know how much we are paying our loan every month and how much a new car or a new gadget costs. It’s easy and simple to compare a higher paying job with a lower paying job. At first.
Then after a while you’ve been working somewhere you start forgetting about the money and noticing about everything else. It’s like a romantic relationship where you start noticing the positive and (especially) the negative only after a while you’ve been together.
Money is a hygiene factor
Money is a hygiene factor: you want to pay people enough that the money discussion is out of the table and you can start focusing on the other things in the job.
You need to convince them to join your company (and money is a big part of it) but stay for everything else.
I don’t know, if my conclusions are valid or not but at least this is what I want to believe :D
What do you think?
