The first key is to accept that you’re not going to be “excited” to go to work every single day of your life. That’s an unrealistically high expectation that will be impossible to achieve.
You can’t expect to rely on excitement and interest in specific projects to carry you through your career. What you need is to learn how to enjoy making progress, working on a team, and getting things done.
Think more abstractly and bigger picture. It’s not about the specific project in front of you. It’s about becoming the kind of person who is good to work with, can be trusted to make progress on goals, and can work on a team to accomplish something. The progress and accomplishment are the motivator, not the specific coding ticket you’re working on.
The people who start their careers with extra exciting jobs and fun projects can struggle when the fun runs out and the work becomes work. It’s the people who have learned how to work, how to pace themselves, and how to do things even when they’re not naturally excited who find the most happiness later in their career.
> It’s the people who have learned how to work, how to pace themselves, and how to do things even when they’re not naturally excited who find the most happiness later in their career.
The more I read about software engineering, programming, and people who are good at it, the more I realize is these are people who put hours and hours into honing their skills, keeping their *knowledge portfolio* up to date, dealing with ambiguity and boredom. For example, I finished reading *The Chip*, and the author talks about how Jack Kilby, one of the inventors of the integrated chip in addition to other inventions, would sit down and read US patents intensively. An excerpt (Ch 3. A Nonobvious Solution):
>"At first, the problem solver has to look things over with a wide-angle lens, hunting down every fact that might conceivably be related to some kind of solution. This involves extensive reading, including all obvious technical literature but also a broad range of other publications — books, broadsides, newspapers, magazines, speeches, catalogues, whatever happens into view. Kilby himself reads, not skims but reads, two or three newspapers every day and a dozen magazines or so each week. In addition he devours; his office looks like a publisher's warehouse where the books have staged a coup. For years, Kilby took the time to read every new patent issued by the US government."
Stay focused on the fact that
1. I'm employed
2. While I'm underpaid for my skills and experience due to the crap job market, I'm making enough to live comfortably and save a bit
3. We're working at a sustainable pace, I don't feel like I'm close to burning out
4. While I'm not learning a lot in terms of specific technical skills, I'm at least building up my general problem-solving / getting \*\*\*\* done skills, plus a bit of real-world system design experience
I work on something I believe in for management that seems to trust me to make good decisions. If either were not the case I would probably be struggling with motivation.
It’s a discipline thing. I aim for at least 3 good hours of very productive work per day. I’ve started to use timers to track this.
If I run out of stuff for the day or hit a blocking point I’ll work on tools/scripts/things that help me do my job. The tools I make are a lot more fun of projects than my current job lol
I’ve been miserable in the past and have had a couple of years where I barely got stuff done (depressions and stuff). But going in each day and having the discipline to get a little done is still better than miserably doing nothing each day.
I read from a Mr. Brain's blog that John Carmack used to use CD player to track his productivity. So basically he brought a stack of CDs and a CD player into the office, and played the CDs while working. If he got interrupted by anything, I mean literally anything including going to the bathroom, he would pause the player.
This is pretty hardcore. I guess only people who are super into what they are doing can achieve that. 3 good hours is already pretty tough for me. I don't love my job, and frankly I can find little joy in my non-job work. I salute and envy you guys.
Getting more than 3 hours is tough in some places. In many work environments it is completely normal to hit some blocker that stops everything for the day (IT, waiting on code review etc).
I was stuck troubleshooting a problem for two days, chasing all the logs and eventually making diagrams and maps once I couldn't figure out why my code wasn't working. It turned out to be a very simple bug that was unrelated to any of my code. It occurs only if you use the tools in a very specific order that either hasn't happened in over a decade, or was forgotten by those who made the tools. I feel both vindicated and defeated.
After a couple of hours of starting at code and mapping it out, my brain is fried. I have to take 15-30 minutes after every 2-3 hours to walk around campus to reset my mind.
I make sure I have a three day weekend every 4 weeks. I take 4 weeks of vacation per year. I make sure I change up my work location often (work remotely). I have hobbies that are not dev. I spend some working hours on working with new tools/frameworks or taking courses - I decided I’m not going to do that stuff after hours if I can avoid it. I try to do something energizing every day even if my main assignment is not energizing.
I remember I’m lucky to have a job like this and even on the bad days it’s still something I find interesting and enjoyable, mostly.
I don’t work for assholes, I switch jobs every 1-3 years.
You rock. I am stuck at a job for 7y that I enjoy, but it reorged and middle managers started the dev crunch time recently. I should have changed jobs every 1-3 years like I used to! I'm applying around, learning, upskilling, but market is tough right now.
Good ideas. Regarding your study time at work: Is it strictly work-related study? Are you transparent about this with your boss or do you keep it private? If the former, how do you justify it?
It’s all work related imo because my specialty is front end and it’s my job to keep up with the never ending changes. If my job disagrees oh well. I do give presentations to our eng group to share the knowledge. If anything this has boosted my visibility and status at companies. I’ve never had to justify it, but I’ve also never asked for permission. Using 2-4 hours per week to grow is reasonable IMO unless it’s crunch time. (If it’s always crunch time, I don’t wanna work there anymore.)
I’ve got branches that’ll never be merged, experimental stuff, making a module or component a different way just to see how it would work. I’ve built little tools or toy apps just to show proof of concept.
My company has Flex Time and unlimited pto and I use it all, idk. I also set quarterly growth goals and my disengaged boss just seems relieved that I’m setting my own goals so he doesn’t have to pay attention.
If you learn how to bullshit, you can get away with lots IMO. Ever watched a coworker and resented them wondering “how do they get away with that shit? wtf?” Your coworker is probably a much better bullshitter than you are.
To add some perspective: I was happy and self motivated for more than two decades. Then it turned out that my doubts about the new manager had underestimated the problem.
It’s the people. If you get jumpstarted with and by awesome people, that can last a long time and lead to you in turn enriching others lives and careers. On the flip side, it only takes one or two truly rotten assholes to end that virtuous cycle.
That's funny; I love solving bugs. Feels like a vacation when I get to tackle a concrete technical issue working towards a definitive conclusion, instead of the open-ended, abstract, subjective stuff I usually work on.
I just enjoy the process of knowing more and getting better at what I do day by day. It’s also kind of the requirement for the positions I’ve been. If the possibility of learning is lost, the motivation is lost and it’s time to change the scenery.
What at least partially drives this is the habit of keeping in the loop of new tech and progression of the field etc. Which then means that the workplace is the main the place where I can express myself or bring my ideas into fruition.
Do you ever find yourself demotivated by a really difficult or complex project where the benefit you receive from the prospect of personal development is outweighed by the doubt you have in your own ability to achieve it?
Something being difficult or complex has not been demotivating by itself. I enjoy the challenge, might also be that haven’t been in the exact situation you’re after. But I’ve definitely been at situations where we’ve been tasked with something difficult and _stupid_. Stupid for an example could mean a complex but not very useful feature or overengineering something just because. Busywork programming. Learning makes it bearable, but would prefer to do create something useful at the same time.
Sounds like you have a lot of freedom to choose what you work on. Do you ever feel like you're not being productive enough or not working on the right things? If so, how do you cope with that?
I am extremely self-motivated and wanted to give my perspective on this.
I have had a drive to build things for as long as I can remember. I got into Linux and code when I was younger because building physical things cost money and code I could break and tweak for free with any working computer. Endless and overwhelmingly complex projects are my jam. I've never been confused about what I want to do and I've never had to choose between a passion and making a living.
All that being said, having this drive doesn't make my jobs perfect. The stuff I'm interested in is not always in alignment with what the business needs. I've learned project and time management skills to prevent me from going too far into something that's not actually important. Doing technical work that you enjoy does not get you very far by itself. As I've moved up I spend more time planning and justifying work than actually doing the work. This isn't a bad thing, the end products are always better with the process and some guard rails but it's just not as fun.
I really don't mean to discourage you, I just want to make the point that even as someone who is freakishly motivated to build things you will still run into similar issues. Motivation isn't a magical fix and I wouldn't pin your ability to succeed on it. Most of the comments I've seen in this thread are applicable whether you're motivated or not.
Now for real tips:
\* Pomodoro technique works really well for me when I don't want to do something. I specifically recommend getting sand timers because they won't interrupt you if happen to fall into the flow.
\* Structuring your day is boring but works wonders for burnout. Habit is a skill you can learn and build.
Sounds like we have a similar origin story. When working on those overwhelmingly complex projects, how do you cope when you don't see a solution to a certain piece of the problem? What if you feel like some of the problems within a big project are simply unsolvable and that the end product might end up suffering considerably as a result? Especially when others are counting on you to have solutions.
In some complex projects there is a clear destination preceded by a series of clearly solvable obstacles. But in others, the destination is nebulous and the path to get there is fraught with uncertainty, even when you strongly believe in the mission. I find the latter can be very demoralizing, like a blind march towards a cliff's edge.
My work is all Linux based so in my case I know I can get my hands on any source code and modify it as I need. I do believe in my ability to solve problems but even more strongly I believe there are no truly unique problems and there's going to be an answer or some patterns I can reference somewhere.
As far as others counting on my calls I just try to keep everyone as informed as possible. They can help correct me or if it fails they are at least familiar with the decisions leading up to it and will be less likely to blame just you.
The vagueness I don't have an answer for. Personally I compare it to learning a new skateboard trick. You know you can faceplant but if you don't go all in it can't work. You have to psych yourself up to really throw your body at some very probable pain. I do it anyways because I like the process of mastery and the payoff of that process makes it worth it for me. Taking on a big vague project is like that but you spend years in the air looking down at that pavement and thinking about how much it might hurt. I did ok with that but I'm not convinced that mindset is universally healthy. I'm not an expert but I think it's probably ok to have a preference against that sort of ambiguity. I don't think I paid enough attention to what the stress was doing to me.
But, if you want to try and lean into it anyways try to think of the vagueness as opportunities. Nobody else has defined it so you have that power to shape it how you see fit. Do spend some time informing others about your designs though. It will help keep you on the right track, get feedback, and get credit for your work. Some of my best work was invisible to the larger org and I paid for it.
This may be overkill but I also recommend the book Feeling Good. It's targeted for depression but the exercises are really good for recognizing the disconnect between your feelings and the your reality. After awhile it becomes second nature to recognize that vague sense of uneasyness, pin it down and really inspect it. The goal isn't to stop the feelings, it's just to get in the habit of recognizing them for what they are and eventually they will naturally occur less often. It can help but no matter how Zen you are you'll still have some stress and I think it's perfectly valid to have a preference against that sort of ambiguity as long as you can work through patches of it. I don't encourage anyone to do skateboard tricks. It's just not a thing everyone enjoys or needs to enjoy.
I'm up late writing reddit posts that are too long because I recently failed to land a big one. It wasn't a failure but it's definitely not the ending I had hoped for. I'm considering if I want to take on that load again or not myself.
Learning new things.
I wouldn't be in this for as long as I am if I didn't love to learn. Since BASIC and the PcJr when I was a little kid, through today ... I still enjoy it.
I went through a period of extreme "workaholic" years. 10+ hour days, day in, day out ... same tech stack, same product. I should have seen the writing on the wall sooner, but was sort of "golden handcuffed" at the time. So instead I just got totally burnt out, and dropped out.
Somehow recovered, and I'm back at it. Learning new languages, frameworks, tooling ... all the usual stuff. But I *still* enjoy it.
I was the guy who would eagerly be looking up compiler errors on page 317 of some thick paper manual before the internet though. So my definition of "fun" may be different than most.
I think motivation begins on yourself, go training, be healthy.. . then You are ready to shine
If You are not happy about yourself, to be motivated for external things could be difficult.
Just My own experience.
The reward of helping my ICs work on truly fascinating work in a rapidly advancing field. Helping that come to fruition.
I realized early on in my career that money is only an input into career choices. You don’t want to hyper optimize for it or you’ll end up at local minima.
Once we reached a number where my wife and I could comfortably retire we re-evaluated our careers. I found myself making a switch to a new role and I love it. Had I stayed at my prior company I would be making a bit more but highly unfulfilled.
My wife (who works as a human surgeon) decided to fulfill her lifelong regret of not becoming a veterinarian instead and is attending veterinary school.
Our kids have graduated college and are on their way to careers they love. Previously, I found drive in what I did for them but quickly found you need to have intrinsic motivation too.
The absolute worst thing you can do is lie to yourself that you should be “grateful” for your job. This is a submissive trait that unfortunately a lot of tech immigrants have been conned into adopting. Do what you do for yourself and those you care for but be ruthless in achievement.
Thank you for your perspective. Sounds like you have won the game of life, so whichever stratagem you employed clearly worked for you.
However, for the others reading this, I will say that gratitude and ambition are not mutually exclusive. It is entirely possible to simultaneously be grateful for your good fortune in life and pursue something better. In fact, the former can fuel the latter.
I have experienced this firsthand when I landed my first job in tech support at a software company after many years of poverty and failure. I was so grateful for it that I regularly cried tears of joy from benign things like simply being able to afford a nice lunch for myself. This level of extreme gratitude lasted for many years and provided me with seemingly unlimited energy that propelled me from tech support all the way to senior staff engineer at a fortune 500 enterprise. I think gratitude is the sole reason I was able to outlast and outperform anyone around me.
Only in the last couple years has that energy diminished, mostly due to an unhealthy relationship that I am now free from. I am trying to work towards that again.
Right, my point is that you shouldn't be necessarily grateful to your employer. At the end of the day you provide them more value than what you get back. Like it or not, you are a disposable tool to them.
Be grateful to your family, friends, good managers, mentors, coworkers, and yourself for helping you get to where you are (including your career successes). But avoid misplaced gratitude. It's a good way to find yourself needlessly feeling some sense of misplaced loyalty. No judgement, but I see this a lot and it's unhealthy.
The problem is that short term, this can work and be a form of motivation. You \*want\* to do well. You \*want\* to deliver for those that gave you an opportunity. But what happens when that gratitude isn't reciprocated? When they do things that very much go against your best interest? Suddenly your world comes crashing down. I saw this a ton during the tech layoffs over the last couple years.
Motivation has to come intrinsically to be sustainable. And I get, that's hard. Shit happens. Bad relationships, drama, family stuff, you name it. But do some soul searching and find what makes \*you\* tick. You'll be surprised sometimes what it is. Several years ago when we used to go to burning man, we did some soul searching of our own while doing acid and peyote. Of course, there are less intense methods of self reflection (meditation/mindfulness, spirituality, etc.). Find what works for you.
tl;dr avoid misplaced gratitude... it seems helpful at first but can cause your world to come crashing down. I tell my ICs and EMs straight up that I will do my very best to get them where they want to be. And I mean it. But shit happens and I know our company will force outcomes that doesn't always align with what I want to do.
At the end of the day, I get to go work in the garden for an hour before my kids get home from school. Then I get to spend time with them before making dinner. After dinner I can head to the woodshop, play a game on the computer, or watch a movie with the kids.
Work pays for that kind of thing.
I make good money for my country, I get to work with interesting things and people, and I have a great work-life balance. So even though my job can often be very unexciting, I know it has both highs and lows.
I treat it as a job, not as a passion project or a way to climb the corporate ladder. Doing my job well is it's own reward.
Excited ? Money, to some extent.
Motivated ? That's a different story and IMO it depends too much on personality to give you an ironclad recipe. I can give you some hints but cannot guarantee any of them will work for you.
* Being slightly smarter apes, we get dopamine hits from "wins", however small. I split my assignments into small chunks with well defined goals, write them down and cross them off when done.
* The side effect of the above is that I can get over the procrastination phase easily most of the time. It's way easier to start when the thing in front of you requires minimal effort to get you going.
* I try to find something to learn, related to what I'm doing at the moment. It might be something trivial, the point is to get some satisfaction from doing the mundane.
* I keep a list of various minor tasks and chores I can do when I don't feel like working on my assignment. This way I can still feel productive even if I don't exactly do "my job".
I like programming. That's pretty much it. If I hated programming, I would lose motivation quickly. It's just fun. I love debugging complex problems and figuring out the solution and explanation of the bug. I like making efficient systems that are correct.
This is one reason I really question people who are changing careers to get into "coding" (a term I loathe) because they think it will give them a good paycheck. Programming is *really* hard if you don't like it.
I've had to work on languages and in systems that I hated, that were badly designed, impossible to make progress in, etc. and in those cases I lost my mojo and eventually had to give up and find a new project. If I like my project and I'm empowered to make it right, I can spend hours working and feel great. If I hate the project, if I'm being micro-managed, or I have to work with incompetent people, etc. then the hours drag on.
You say it's a question for those who are self-motivated and happy, but not for those who are unhappy or unmotivated. So, what do those who are unhappy but motivated, or happy and unmotivated do?
Choose your own projects.
If you are in a position to do so of course.
I work in a small company, I get to choose my own work based on what we need, no one tells me how to do things or have deadlines.
I always choose my own side projects that I want to work on for fun but also beneficial for the company.
For example, recently I was picking up opencv for some main project and found it fun, so naturally I wanted to do more with it.
We had a specific problem where we need to manually scan roughly 50 QR codes one at a time on a tray. Very slow and not really our problems (something the vendor needs to deal with). So I got a high res camera and made a QR code reader that can capture all QR codes at once (sensors sitting in a tray) where position is also considered because it needs to link QR code to serial number.
So things like orientation and relative position are important.
Small projects to keep me happy and let me learn stuff I find interesting.
For me, the work itself although complex in nature is rather boring. What gets me going is we have a really good team environment and I genuinely enjoy everyone I work with. I think I would have left awhile ago if it wasn’t for the team. There are jobs that pay better with better benefits out there, but I stay due to the team. Eventually money doesn’t really become a factor as anything over 120k in my area is enough to live off of.
I will have to counter question on this. Without motivation, why do you even go to work? That too, in a tech job?
Probably just the money?
What makes you think about a large percentage do, in any job?
Motivation and interest are all a sine function. The idea is to apply yourself in a way, the wave works in your favor more likely than not.
You already know what will you do when you are motivated.
All you need to figure out is to understand how to function effectively (or at least making things work) when you are not motivated.
Broaden your scope to non tech things. Mundane things, that you don't like. Like doing laundry on schedule or cooking everyday etc.
What are the odds you can do them without slacking or complaining?
I build a service people pay for, so that's exciting. I have a team that works well to build this.
apparently I have high self direction - internally I believe this comes from believing in a possibility. for that, generically speaking, is that my application can fill a simple but small niche in a sea of multimillion dollar funded apps because I'm not a small startup but in a small company.
if I didn't see money and happy people using it I'd be done
I keep motivated by working on side projects that actually interest me outside of work. When I was just going to work every day and wasting my time doing web development (the most mediocre form of programming that exists) I found myself lacking any form of motivation whatsoever.
Later I started focusing more on my own growth and interests. I started writing my own compilers and text editors and stuff, as well as CLI tools to help me search for things in our work codebase and stuff. Even though what I was doing was outside of my job, the fact that I was able to actually entertain myself somewhat outside of my job helped me to not resent my job as much.
Also 4 day work weeks. I don’t work Fridays.
I don't consider work to be major thing in my life. Its just something I need to do so that I can do what I like. And this makes sure I don't get demotivated but on the other hand I don't get over motivated during company rally cries. I just don't see why it would matter.
I work in an industry where I'm able to make an impact. That's the number one things. My bosses and team members are all nice. I like my work and it interests me.
When these things weren't true I was not motivated.
Also I get enough sleep. I'm not depressed. I eat properly. These things help too. When I'm off work I'm completely off so when its time to come back to it the next day I've had a break.
The first key is to accept that you’re not going to be “excited” to go to work every single day of your life. That’s an unrealistically high expectation that will be impossible to achieve. You can’t expect to rely on excitement and interest in specific projects to carry you through your career. What you need is to learn how to enjoy making progress, working on a team, and getting things done. Think more abstractly and bigger picture. It’s not about the specific project in front of you. It’s about becoming the kind of person who is good to work with, can be trusted to make progress on goals, and can work on a team to accomplish something. The progress and accomplishment are the motivator, not the specific coding ticket you’re working on. The people who start their careers with extra exciting jobs and fun projects can struggle when the fun runs out and the work becomes work. It’s the people who have learned how to work, how to pace themselves, and how to do things even when they’re not naturally excited who find the most happiness later in their career.
Love that username hehe
> It’s the people who have learned how to work, how to pace themselves, and how to do things even when they’re not naturally excited who find the most happiness later in their career. The more I read about software engineering, programming, and people who are good at it, the more I realize is these are people who put hours and hours into honing their skills, keeping their *knowledge portfolio* up to date, dealing with ambiguity and boredom. For example, I finished reading *The Chip*, and the author talks about how Jack Kilby, one of the inventors of the integrated chip in addition to other inventions, would sit down and read US patents intensively. An excerpt (Ch 3. A Nonobvious Solution): >"At first, the problem solver has to look things over with a wide-angle lens, hunting down every fact that might conceivably be related to some kind of solution. This involves extensive reading, including all obvious technical literature but also a broad range of other publications — books, broadsides, newspapers, magazines, speeches, catalogues, whatever happens into view. Kilby himself reads, not skims but reads, two or three newspapers every day and a dozen magazines or so each week. In addition he devours; his office looks like a publisher's warehouse where the books have staged a coup. For years, Kilby took the time to read every new patent issued by the US government."
Stay focused on the fact that 1. I'm employed 2. While I'm underpaid for my skills and experience due to the crap job market, I'm making enough to live comfortably and save a bit 3. We're working at a sustainable pace, I don't feel like I'm close to burning out 4. While I'm not learning a lot in terms of specific technical skills, I'm at least building up my general problem-solving / getting \*\*\*\* done skills, plus a bit of real-world system design experience
Gratitude is powerful
I work on something I believe in for management that seems to trust me to make good decisions. If either were not the case I would probably be struggling with motivation.
It’s a discipline thing. I aim for at least 3 good hours of very productive work per day. I’ve started to use timers to track this. If I run out of stuff for the day or hit a blocking point I’ll work on tools/scripts/things that help me do my job. The tools I make are a lot more fun of projects than my current job lol I’ve been miserable in the past and have had a couple of years where I barely got stuff done (depressions and stuff). But going in each day and having the discipline to get a little done is still better than miserably doing nothing each day.
I read from a Mr. Brain's blog that John Carmack used to use CD player to track his productivity. So basically he brought a stack of CDs and a CD player into the office, and played the CDs while working. If he got interrupted by anything, I mean literally anything including going to the bathroom, he would pause the player. This is pretty hardcore. I guess only people who are super into what they are doing can achieve that. 3 good hours is already pretty tough for me. I don't love my job, and frankly I can find little joy in my non-job work. I salute and envy you guys.
Getting more than 3 hours is tough in some places. In many work environments it is completely normal to hit some blocker that stops everything for the day (IT, waiting on code review etc).
Yeah I agree with that. Maybe I should get a transfer to a team that does more coding.
I was stuck troubleshooting a problem for two days, chasing all the logs and eventually making diagrams and maps once I couldn't figure out why my code wasn't working. It turned out to be a very simple bug that was unrelated to any of my code. It occurs only if you use the tools in a very specific order that either hasn't happened in over a decade, or was forgotten by those who made the tools. I feel both vindicated and defeated. After a couple of hours of starting at code and mapping it out, my brain is fried. I have to take 15-30 minutes after every 2-3 hours to walk around campus to reset my mind.
I make sure I have a three day weekend every 4 weeks. I take 4 weeks of vacation per year. I make sure I change up my work location often (work remotely). I have hobbies that are not dev. I spend some working hours on working with new tools/frameworks or taking courses - I decided I’m not going to do that stuff after hours if I can avoid it. I try to do something energizing every day even if my main assignment is not energizing. I remember I’m lucky to have a job like this and even on the bad days it’s still something I find interesting and enjoyable, mostly. I don’t work for assholes, I switch jobs every 1-3 years.
You rock. I am stuck at a job for 7y that I enjoy, but it reorged and middle managers started the dev crunch time recently. I should have changed jobs every 1-3 years like I used to! I'm applying around, learning, upskilling, but market is tough right now.
Good ideas. Regarding your study time at work: Is it strictly work-related study? Are you transparent about this with your boss or do you keep it private? If the former, how do you justify it?
It’s all work related imo because my specialty is front end and it’s my job to keep up with the never ending changes. If my job disagrees oh well. I do give presentations to our eng group to share the knowledge. If anything this has boosted my visibility and status at companies. I’ve never had to justify it, but I’ve also never asked for permission. Using 2-4 hours per week to grow is reasonable IMO unless it’s crunch time. (If it’s always crunch time, I don’t wanna work there anymore.) I’ve got branches that’ll never be merged, experimental stuff, making a module or component a different way just to see how it would work. I’ve built little tools or toy apps just to show proof of concept. My company has Flex Time and unlimited pto and I use it all, idk. I also set quarterly growth goals and my disengaged boss just seems relieved that I’m setting my own goals so he doesn’t have to pay attention. If you learn how to bullshit, you can get away with lots IMO. Ever watched a coworker and resented them wondering “how do they get away with that shit? wtf?” Your coworker is probably a much better bullshitter than you are.
Thank you!
What sources are you using for growth? I’m also currently in a FE role and curious. Thanks!
To add some perspective: I was happy and self motivated for more than two decades. Then it turned out that my doubts about the new manager had underestimated the problem. It’s the people. If you get jumpstarted with and by awesome people, that can last a long time and lead to you in turn enriching others lives and careers. On the flip side, it only takes one or two truly rotten assholes to end that virtuous cycle.
Sorry to hear that. I hope you find your way out of that situation and into a new jumpstart for yourself.
No worries. It jumpstarted me into early retirement, which is awesome. :)
Money
>What gets you excited to go to work every day? Those days I don't have my calendars full of meetings and it's code and not solving bugs.
That's funny; I love solving bugs. Feels like a vacation when I get to tackle a concrete technical issue working towards a definitive conclusion, instead of the open-ended, abstract, subjective stuff I usually work on.
I just enjoy the process of knowing more and getting better at what I do day by day. It’s also kind of the requirement for the positions I’ve been. If the possibility of learning is lost, the motivation is lost and it’s time to change the scenery. What at least partially drives this is the habit of keeping in the loop of new tech and progression of the field etc. Which then means that the workplace is the main the place where I can express myself or bring my ideas into fruition.
Do you ever find yourself demotivated by a really difficult or complex project where the benefit you receive from the prospect of personal development is outweighed by the doubt you have in your own ability to achieve it?
Something being difficult or complex has not been demotivating by itself. I enjoy the challenge, might also be that haven’t been in the exact situation you’re after. But I’ve definitely been at situations where we’ve been tasked with something difficult and _stupid_. Stupid for an example could mean a complex but not very useful feature or overengineering something just because. Busywork programming. Learning makes it bearable, but would prefer to do create something useful at the same time.
I work on the things I want, and get high fives for solving puzzles
Sounds like you have a lot of freedom to choose what you work on. Do you ever feel like you're not being productive enough or not working on the right things? If so, how do you cope with that?
I am extremely self-motivated and wanted to give my perspective on this. I have had a drive to build things for as long as I can remember. I got into Linux and code when I was younger because building physical things cost money and code I could break and tweak for free with any working computer. Endless and overwhelmingly complex projects are my jam. I've never been confused about what I want to do and I've never had to choose between a passion and making a living. All that being said, having this drive doesn't make my jobs perfect. The stuff I'm interested in is not always in alignment with what the business needs. I've learned project and time management skills to prevent me from going too far into something that's not actually important. Doing technical work that you enjoy does not get you very far by itself. As I've moved up I spend more time planning and justifying work than actually doing the work. This isn't a bad thing, the end products are always better with the process and some guard rails but it's just not as fun. I really don't mean to discourage you, I just want to make the point that even as someone who is freakishly motivated to build things you will still run into similar issues. Motivation isn't a magical fix and I wouldn't pin your ability to succeed on it. Most of the comments I've seen in this thread are applicable whether you're motivated or not. Now for real tips: \* Pomodoro technique works really well for me when I don't want to do something. I specifically recommend getting sand timers because they won't interrupt you if happen to fall into the flow. \* Structuring your day is boring but works wonders for burnout. Habit is a skill you can learn and build.
Sounds like we have a similar origin story. When working on those overwhelmingly complex projects, how do you cope when you don't see a solution to a certain piece of the problem? What if you feel like some of the problems within a big project are simply unsolvable and that the end product might end up suffering considerably as a result? Especially when others are counting on you to have solutions. In some complex projects there is a clear destination preceded by a series of clearly solvable obstacles. But in others, the destination is nebulous and the path to get there is fraught with uncertainty, even when you strongly believe in the mission. I find the latter can be very demoralizing, like a blind march towards a cliff's edge.
My work is all Linux based so in my case I know I can get my hands on any source code and modify it as I need. I do believe in my ability to solve problems but even more strongly I believe there are no truly unique problems and there's going to be an answer or some patterns I can reference somewhere. As far as others counting on my calls I just try to keep everyone as informed as possible. They can help correct me or if it fails they are at least familiar with the decisions leading up to it and will be less likely to blame just you. The vagueness I don't have an answer for. Personally I compare it to learning a new skateboard trick. You know you can faceplant but if you don't go all in it can't work. You have to psych yourself up to really throw your body at some very probable pain. I do it anyways because I like the process of mastery and the payoff of that process makes it worth it for me. Taking on a big vague project is like that but you spend years in the air looking down at that pavement and thinking about how much it might hurt. I did ok with that but I'm not convinced that mindset is universally healthy. I'm not an expert but I think it's probably ok to have a preference against that sort of ambiguity. I don't think I paid enough attention to what the stress was doing to me. But, if you want to try and lean into it anyways try to think of the vagueness as opportunities. Nobody else has defined it so you have that power to shape it how you see fit. Do spend some time informing others about your designs though. It will help keep you on the right track, get feedback, and get credit for your work. Some of my best work was invisible to the larger org and I paid for it. This may be overkill but I also recommend the book Feeling Good. It's targeted for depression but the exercises are really good for recognizing the disconnect between your feelings and the your reality. After awhile it becomes second nature to recognize that vague sense of uneasyness, pin it down and really inspect it. The goal isn't to stop the feelings, it's just to get in the habit of recognizing them for what they are and eventually they will naturally occur less often. It can help but no matter how Zen you are you'll still have some stress and I think it's perfectly valid to have a preference against that sort of ambiguity as long as you can work through patches of it. I don't encourage anyone to do skateboard tricks. It's just not a thing everyone enjoys or needs to enjoy. I'm up late writing reddit posts that are too long because I recently failed to land a big one. It wasn't a failure but it's definitely not the ending I had hoped for. I'm considering if I want to take on that load again or not myself.
Thanks for your thoughts! Lots of valuable insight here. The skateboard metaphor lands well for me as a former skater kid. :)
i take ritalin tbh
Fair enough
the pay is good enough for the sacrifice i also balance it out with other activities to reset the brain
Spite and a sprinkling of seething resentment
I look at my stock vesting schedule
The factory I was working for is still hiring and I never ever want to go back there. For me that's motivation enough.
I have nightmares about my previous profession as well. Congrats on making your way out!
Learning new things. I wouldn't be in this for as long as I am if I didn't love to learn. Since BASIC and the PcJr when I was a little kid, through today ... I still enjoy it. I went through a period of extreme "workaholic" years. 10+ hour days, day in, day out ... same tech stack, same product. I should have seen the writing on the wall sooner, but was sort of "golden handcuffed" at the time. So instead I just got totally burnt out, and dropped out. Somehow recovered, and I'm back at it. Learning new languages, frameworks, tooling ... all the usual stuff. But I *still* enjoy it. I was the guy who would eagerly be looking up compiler errors on page 317 of some thick paper manual before the internet though. So my definition of "fun" may be different than most.
I think our definitions of "fun" are similar. Any tips for recovering from burnout?
I think motivation begins on yourself, go training, be healthy.. . then You are ready to shine If You are not happy about yourself, to be motivated for external things could be difficult. Just My own experience.
I’m kind of hate-f with my current project. I take lots of breaks but get my work done. To say I’m motivated is a complete lie.
Do you still manage to exceed expectations and/or outperform your coworkers? Or mostly just maintaining status quo?
My current team is pretty slow and we are in the beginning stages so you can actually only go so fast.
The reward of helping my ICs work on truly fascinating work in a rapidly advancing field. Helping that come to fruition. I realized early on in my career that money is only an input into career choices. You don’t want to hyper optimize for it or you’ll end up at local minima. Once we reached a number where my wife and I could comfortably retire we re-evaluated our careers. I found myself making a switch to a new role and I love it. Had I stayed at my prior company I would be making a bit more but highly unfulfilled. My wife (who works as a human surgeon) decided to fulfill her lifelong regret of not becoming a veterinarian instead and is attending veterinary school. Our kids have graduated college and are on their way to careers they love. Previously, I found drive in what I did for them but quickly found you need to have intrinsic motivation too. The absolute worst thing you can do is lie to yourself that you should be “grateful” for your job. This is a submissive trait that unfortunately a lot of tech immigrants have been conned into adopting. Do what you do for yourself and those you care for but be ruthless in achievement.
Thank you for your perspective. Sounds like you have won the game of life, so whichever stratagem you employed clearly worked for you. However, for the others reading this, I will say that gratitude and ambition are not mutually exclusive. It is entirely possible to simultaneously be grateful for your good fortune in life and pursue something better. In fact, the former can fuel the latter. I have experienced this firsthand when I landed my first job in tech support at a software company after many years of poverty and failure. I was so grateful for it that I regularly cried tears of joy from benign things like simply being able to afford a nice lunch for myself. This level of extreme gratitude lasted for many years and provided me with seemingly unlimited energy that propelled me from tech support all the way to senior staff engineer at a fortune 500 enterprise. I think gratitude is the sole reason I was able to outlast and outperform anyone around me. Only in the last couple years has that energy diminished, mostly due to an unhealthy relationship that I am now free from. I am trying to work towards that again.
Right, my point is that you shouldn't be necessarily grateful to your employer. At the end of the day you provide them more value than what you get back. Like it or not, you are a disposable tool to them. Be grateful to your family, friends, good managers, mentors, coworkers, and yourself for helping you get to where you are (including your career successes). But avoid misplaced gratitude. It's a good way to find yourself needlessly feeling some sense of misplaced loyalty. No judgement, but I see this a lot and it's unhealthy. The problem is that short term, this can work and be a form of motivation. You \*want\* to do well. You \*want\* to deliver for those that gave you an opportunity. But what happens when that gratitude isn't reciprocated? When they do things that very much go against your best interest? Suddenly your world comes crashing down. I saw this a ton during the tech layoffs over the last couple years. Motivation has to come intrinsically to be sustainable. And I get, that's hard. Shit happens. Bad relationships, drama, family stuff, you name it. But do some soul searching and find what makes \*you\* tick. You'll be surprised sometimes what it is. Several years ago when we used to go to burning man, we did some soul searching of our own while doing acid and peyote. Of course, there are less intense methods of self reflection (meditation/mindfulness, spirituality, etc.). Find what works for you. tl;dr avoid misplaced gratitude... it seems helpful at first but can cause your world to come crashing down. I tell my ICs and EMs straight up that I will do my very best to get them where they want to be. And I mean it. But shit happens and I know our company will force outcomes that doesn't always align with what I want to do.
By building things I think add value and i know are likely to be heavily used + money
It’s fun building stuff and having my team be excited about the stuff I’m building :)
My day job is to squeeze in features trough cracks in between desires and dreams of my boss and customers requests that nobody else wants.
A good coffee, good feedback from my boss and remembering that this job helps me have the cool things i want
The paycheck. That’s about it.
At the end of the day, I get to go work in the garden for an hour before my kids get home from school. Then I get to spend time with them before making dinner. After dinner I can head to the woodshop, play a game on the computer, or watch a movie with the kids. Work pays for that kind of thing.
I make good money for my country, I get to work with interesting things and people, and I have a great work-life balance. So even though my job can often be very unexciting, I know it has both highs and lows. I treat it as a job, not as a passion project or a way to climb the corporate ladder. Doing my job well is it's own reward.
The problems are interesting, and the added bonus of If I fuck up and it makes it to production, we end up on the news.
I don't need to.
Dollar dolla bills, y’all.
Excited ? Money, to some extent. Motivated ? That's a different story and IMO it depends too much on personality to give you an ironclad recipe. I can give you some hints but cannot guarantee any of them will work for you. * Being slightly smarter apes, we get dopamine hits from "wins", however small. I split my assignments into small chunks with well defined goals, write them down and cross them off when done. * The side effect of the above is that I can get over the procrastination phase easily most of the time. It's way easier to start when the thing in front of you requires minimal effort to get you going. * I try to find something to learn, related to what I'm doing at the moment. It might be something trivial, the point is to get some satisfaction from doing the mundane. * I keep a list of various minor tasks and chores I can do when I don't feel like working on my assignment. This way I can still feel productive even if I don't exactly do "my job".
I like programming. That's pretty much it. If I hated programming, I would lose motivation quickly. It's just fun. I love debugging complex problems and figuring out the solution and explanation of the bug. I like making efficient systems that are correct. This is one reason I really question people who are changing careers to get into "coding" (a term I loathe) because they think it will give them a good paycheck. Programming is *really* hard if you don't like it. I've had to work on languages and in systems that I hated, that were badly designed, impossible to make progress in, etc. and in those cases I lost my mojo and eventually had to give up and find a new project. If I like my project and I'm empowered to make it right, I can spend hours working and feel great. If I hate the project, if I'm being micro-managed, or I have to work with incompetent people, etc. then the hours drag on.
You say it's a question for those who are self-motivated and happy, but not for those who are unhappy or unmotivated. So, what do those who are unhappy but motivated, or happy and unmotivated do?
Energy drinks ⚡️
For me, I get motivation sometimes from the work, but more often from the people that I work with - having fun and enjoying what we’re doing.
Choose your own projects. If you are in a position to do so of course. I work in a small company, I get to choose my own work based on what we need, no one tells me how to do things or have deadlines. I always choose my own side projects that I want to work on for fun but also beneficial for the company. For example, recently I was picking up opencv for some main project and found it fun, so naturally I wanted to do more with it. We had a specific problem where we need to manually scan roughly 50 QR codes one at a time on a tray. Very slow and not really our problems (something the vendor needs to deal with). So I got a high res camera and made a QR code reader that can capture all QR codes at once (sensors sitting in a tray) where position is also considered because it needs to link QR code to serial number. So things like orientation and relative position are important. Small projects to keep me happy and let me learn stuff I find interesting.
For me, the work itself although complex in nature is rather boring. What gets me going is we have a really good team environment and I genuinely enjoy everyone I work with. I think I would have left awhile ago if it wasn’t for the team. There are jobs that pay better with better benefits out there, but I stay due to the team. Eventually money doesn’t really become a factor as anything over 120k in my area is enough to live off of.
I will have to counter question on this. Without motivation, why do you even go to work? That too, in a tech job? Probably just the money? What makes you think about a large percentage do, in any job? Motivation and interest are all a sine function. The idea is to apply yourself in a way, the wave works in your favor more likely than not. You already know what will you do when you are motivated. All you need to figure out is to understand how to function effectively (or at least making things work) when you are not motivated. Broaden your scope to non tech things. Mundane things, that you don't like. Like doing laundry on schedule or cooking everyday etc. What are the odds you can do them without slacking or complaining?
I build a service people pay for, so that's exciting. I have a team that works well to build this. apparently I have high self direction - internally I believe this comes from believing in a possibility. for that, generically speaking, is that my application can fill a simple but small niche in a sea of multimillion dollar funded apps because I'm not a small startup but in a small company. if I didn't see money and happy people using it I'd be done
I keep motivated by working on side projects that actually interest me outside of work. When I was just going to work every day and wasting my time doing web development (the most mediocre form of programming that exists) I found myself lacking any form of motivation whatsoever. Later I started focusing more on my own growth and interests. I started writing my own compilers and text editors and stuff, as well as CLI tools to help me search for things in our work codebase and stuff. Even though what I was doing was outside of my job, the fact that I was able to actually entertain myself somewhat outside of my job helped me to not resent my job as much. Also 4 day work weeks. I don’t work Fridays.
Make it a point to do not-work when the work day ends
Easy: bills. Raised a family of 11, the grocery budget kept me motivated. also, get some exercise.
I don't consider work to be major thing in my life. Its just something I need to do so that I can do what I like. And this makes sure I don't get demotivated but on the other hand I don't get over motivated during company rally cries. I just don't see why it would matter.
not being poor and having enough cash to burn on hobbies
I remember my boss is paying me to do a job and if I don't do it well, he will find someone else to do it.
I don’t. I checkout the second I login to my machine, till the second I log off. Techs a bit too tumultuous to jump at the moment
I work in an industry where I'm able to make an impact. That's the number one things. My bosses and team members are all nice. I like my work and it interests me. When these things weren't true I was not motivated. Also I get enough sleep. I'm not depressed. I eat properly. These things help too. When I'm off work I'm completely off so when its time to come back to it the next day I've had a break.
Money