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I’ve been both in my career, I know that through introspection and from external feedback. I’ve been employed as a software engineer for 13 years now and come to accept that my biggest motivator, the thing that most drives whether I do a good job or not, is caring about what I’m building.

There are other factors, of course. I’ve cared deeply about products I’ve worked on and still resigned due to disagreeing with the CEOs ethics, or how we were forced to meet unrealistic and artificial deadlines. I’ve also had bullies for managers, which makes it challenging to perform.

In my ~18 month stint being a manager myself, the key thing I focused on was my team’s motivations. One of them had aspirations to take my job one day, another wanted to work on features they could show their mum, another just wanted to learn a new industry through building.

I met most of these motivations head on (unfortunately it was difficult for reasons outside of my control to get the person who wanted to show their mum their work onto projects that would achieve that, and I’m gutted to this day), and typically received glowing feedback from my team.

9/2/25, 9:52 am0 reposts1 like

And they were all extremely high performing engineers. I don’t know where I’m going with this anymore, but I feel like this “up or out” mentality is a crude optimisation big companies make because they can’t afford to care about you as an individual.