Why not Autonomy, Mastery, Purpose?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drive:_The_Surprising_Truth_...

Perhaps they overlap? I'd even hypothesise that they overlap with solving the 2 hard problems.

There are 2 hard problems in computer science: cache invalidation, naming things, and off-by-1 errors.

-- Phil Karlton, Leon Bamboogiewoogie @secretGeek, Martin Fowler

https://martinfowler.com/bliki/TwoHardThings.html

• Naming things

>> Technology -> Cool Stuff to Work On

>> Purpose — The desire to do something that has meaning and is important.

• Cache invalidation (forgetfulness)

>> Intellection -> Smart People to Work With

>> Mastery — The urge to get better skilled.

• Off-by-1 errors (self or greater Good)

>> Certainty -> Repeatability in Work Environment

>> Autonomy — Our desire to be self directed. It increases engagement over compliance.

I think they are closely related. Autonomy, Mastery, and Purpose strike me as strategic, thirty thousand foot values that correlate heavily with career satisfaction.

I think the desire for Technology, Intellection, and Certainty are more tactical considerations that engineers want in their day to day duties. I find that those tare things that engineers can easily visualize themselves having access to in a new role. These feed into a feeling (or the hope of feeling) a sense of Autonomy, Mastery, and Purpose in their career as a whole.

First off, excellent article. I've read a huge number of these and almost didn't click on this one. I'm happy I did. All your points are excellent and absolutely true.

That said, I think you may have missed an important one for engineers: respect

In my experience, engineers highly value respect in their current position and a slap in the face from the company can breed lasting resentment or an immediate job search in the current environment.

Respect comes in a few forms:

1) Believing you were actually listened to and your ideas were fairly evaluated, even if in the end the decision didn't go your way. If you're repeatedly getting shot down and don't understand why that feels like the company doesn't value you or your opinion.

2) Compensation: While the absolute number itself to a surprising degree doesn't matter all that much, what effort the company puts in when it can, does. If the company posts record profits, gushes about your performance, you max out your rating and get a 2% bump in pay as a result when at the very least inflation seems to be 6% right now that cognitive dissonance hurts a lot. This is another form of lack of respect that engineers rarely let slide.

3) Clear growth path/investment: If the company respects you and your term goals, you'll see it through an established career plan, at least for the short/medium term (1-3 years). If you're going about the same stuff every day with no room for growth and no one seemingly cares that you want to take on more or you don't see how you could given the pile of work you're stuck under, that's demotivating and shows that the company doesn't really care about you, just about your monotonic cog-like output.

4) Impact and impact recognition: Engineers want to do things that matter. (Already a theme in your article) and often they want that to be known. Not in a cheap artificial pat-on-the-back and flattery way, but in a tangible way. Success should lead to greater responsibility. Failure should lead to introspection and another swing with advisors brought in. Given your successes you should be given opportunity to advise others working on similar problems you've been successful solving. If all you're doing is solving problems in a silo and no one seems to notice or care, it gets demotivating again.

I'm sure there are others but I find that a general theme of respect for the individual is usually very important for engineers.

Honestly, stop with the E*on and whatnot. It just makes the article annoying to read. He doesn't care about any possible SEO "juice" you think that your blog post would give him, and it just makes the thing look unprofessional, IMHO

It seems well written, and well argued to me.

The completionist in me notices you didn't mention NeuroLink - his wiring of brains to computers. It's not often in the news.

I have never heard of NeuroLink! I'll look it up. Thanks for telling me.

Honestly neuralink is a bigger joke than his other projects. Maybe it will go somewhere but its highly improbable, we simply don't understand the brain well enough to make an input/output device meaningful yet

Wouldn't trying to interface with the brain be a good way to understand more about it?

It does sound unlikely that neuralink actually accomplishes anything impressive, but I don't think it's a joke to try and maybe it will be a step towards something that does succeed.

That's why I said maybe it will go somewhere. Its super unlikely though, because I don't think they're doing any of the actual basic research. They're relying on the results out of academia and then just tinkering with that info. It's definitely possible for them to stumble onto something interesting

Enjoyed it, I just jumped ship 6 months ago for basically all the reasons you specified.

Only thing I can add is that due to the difficulty hiring, you can attract mid-level talent with more money (they're more likely to be underpaid). I'm sure the efficacy of that approach is diminishing as steady-state is reached by people in that experience level.

I think that's true up to a point.

I wouldn't take an extra 10k for being able to take my dog for a nice walk at 2PM every day.

Would my mind change for an extra 20k? Probably not.

For an extra 50k? ...maybe, let's talk.

For an extra 100k? ...where do I sign?