But after years I reckoned developers do not need to be motitvated, they are motivated when they start working – otherwise you wouldn’t have hired them, would you? They are actively demotivated. Companies need to stop demotivating them.
This quote was something that really struck home. I read the article titled "Developer Motivation and Satisfaction" while working at Kodak and during a time when was very unhappy in my position. Changes the company was making were causing enough strife within me to make me consider leaving.
My favorite quote is:
They don’t have to motivate their employees. They have to stop demotivating them.
This hit the nail on the head. I still loved what I was doing for Kodak, and I still loved working with my peers at Kodak. I just hated working for Kodak. Being forced to work in a certain manner and having certain tools and restrictions dictated to me without any explanation really rubbed me the wrong way.
The prime example was email. Everyone in the Kodak Victoria office read their email then filed it away in case it was needed later. We did a lot of design, documentaion, and customer bug investigation via email so it was a treasure trove to us. The IT department mandated that we could no longer store email more than 30 days, unless it was special then we could file it in a certain bucket that allowed it to live for 2 years. Oh, and we were also being restricted to 1GB of storage and no external PST file support.
Because of this I had to drastically change how I handled email putting a much greater emphasis on thinking about an email before filing it. This caused a larger amount of my day to be dedicated to email and this was something I did not like.
Soon after the article above, I read "Unchain the Office Computers!" on Slate.com.
It explained why these new restrictions were hurting my morale.
Here's why: The restrictions infantilize workers—they foster resentment, reduce morale, lock people into inefficient routines, and, worst of all, they kill our incentives to work productively.
Another quote:
This jibes with Pink's argument that it's a sense of autonomy—rather than money—that drive employees to work hard. People work best, he argues, when they feel they're being left alone to do their jobs. But it's hard to feel that way if your computer is constantly throwing up roadblocks in your path.
Because of upcoming restrictions, many people in the office actively researched ways around them. That killed productivity for a while, but also made us hate departments within the company. This again is a morale killer.
As a tech worker who has suffered under these conditions I now feel free. I will no longer work for a large company with these crazy restrictions. I have seen the light. To all managers out there I say this: you have attracted some excellent motivated talent; don't screw it up by demotivating them.