What motivates me
The same as with other people, there are a lot of things which motivate me.
Money, fame, fortune(not the same as money), the opposite sex, tough challenges, even good Karma.
But one that really stands out for me as a software(web) developer is this: The Users. I really care about the users.
I often found myself doing these kinds of things in the last few months:
- application goes down – immediately drop ANYTHING (even if it’s a 3:00 AM on a Saturday night) and try to get things fixed.
- updating a production application – if I know there’s going to be even 2 minutes downtime I’d destroy my sleep cycle and wake up before the crack of dawn to make the deployment rather than causing any inconvenience for the user.
- Monitoring user visit/pageview trends and number of users. In my spare and unbilled time just because I want to know users are happy and returning.
Odd enough, I’m usually working on applications for other customers so the end users don’t even know I exist.
I even disagreed on some occasions with the customer because they wanted to do something which I though was bad for the users.
Sadly, I guess in the end it might be some ego-trip, me wanting to have contributed to an application used and appreciated by many people. I even react differently to requests from different clients, favoring the one with the largest user-base.
Is this bad, is it good? I pretty much don’t care, as long as I make a lot of people happy by giving them a good application.
i think you should be proud of yourself
It’s always been about the users. The instant one forgets that, they either pivot real quick, or lose.
Keep going!
I think it’s easy to forget about the users when it’s not your application.
So like in my case, when you’re working for a company which is developing the application for another company which will sell it to the actual users.
I think it’s all about our egos. The users are only the means to get our egos up. Of course, when their number grows so does our ego, and of course you’ll do anything to make the user happy because that’s how you get more of them. If you didn’t care, your piece of software would be lousy, and you’ll feel like a real loser. (which, needless to say, is bad for your ego)
If you would meet one of your (average) users, you’d probably punch him in the face, hit him in the balls, then walk all over the dumb bastard!