By Joe Procopio

You can’t hold a programmer back. Once they get going, they’re like the machines they serve: aggressive, relentless, unstoppable.

A good programmer will code his or her task to spec, create several alternatives and a few bells and whistles that weren’t even in the requirements, and then carve out a back door to add another node to their network of mayhem. Yes, every programmer has a network of mayhem.

In fact, if you’re reading this online, someone is probably staring back at you from the other side of the Internets. If you don’t believe me, hold your credit card up to the screen and then wait for the bank’s fraud department to call.

The problem is the fact that getting a programmer going is hard. Your better coders are unfortunately exactly like the caricatures we’re all familiar with. They like the data, and they like what they can do it. This is why we refer to data as being massaged or manipulated, and shy away from the more accurate terms like misappropriated or murdered.

Programmers also don’t like the users, and this brings about a sort of dichotomy, like painting beautiful pictures to hang over the mantles of people you loathe.

A lot of painters just nodded their heads on reading that last sentence.

So you can see how motivation can be an issue. This isn’t a slam on programmers, in fact it’s anything but. A good programmer is an artist, and comes with all of the quirks and tendencies and diva-like behavior of a Monet or a Spears.

They just do it more quietly, letting it all fester on the inside and ooze out as malaise, which is often mistaken for sloth, which is invariably responded to with indifference. Cause brings about effect, perception justifies reaction, antipathy leads to solitude, and then Rush writes a song about it after adding bits about robots, motorcycles, and/or quantum physics.

Anyway, this phenomenon is why most of your more seasoned programmers seek out and settle into jobs where they don’t have to do much, can’t be fired, and are left alone.

But this doesn’t have to happen. Motivation is a concept often talked about, promoted, hyped, brainstormed, bottled and sold, then completely forgotten and overlooked.

Unfortunately, it’s also the concept most mishandled when it comes to your average techie, and it gets mishandled because it gets treated like a product. And it isn’t a product. It’s a service.

Open any book on motivation and it will purport to sell you the perfect single-use disposable package to apply motivation across your organization in large, time-release doses.

This kind of approach tends to throw everything into the bucket – incentive pay, promotions, work/life balance, and fear –and condone a strategic approach to doling all this out over the lifecycle of a project or career path.

“If I work my ass off and Initech ships a few extra units, I don’t see another dime.”

This is not a slam on organizational motivation. In fact, I’m a big fan. The more you can make the average employee, and thus the average programmer, the beneficiary of a successful campaign rather than just a necessary means to an end, the better the output, and thus the better and more bug-free the code.

Everyone, I don’t care who you are or what kind of oddball, trendy pseudo-philosophy you subscribe to, cares about compensation – not money, per se – but compensation. The kids got to get fed.

“Second prize is a set of steak knives. Third prize is you’re fired”

Fear is probably the only aspect you can remove from that equation and still have a winner. Despite all myths to the contrary, fear will actually do one of two things to your workforce, it will freeze up those with weak constitutions and it will alienate those with strong constitutions.

If you tell someone that if they don’t try harder they’re going to lose their job, they will undoubtedly hear the following: “You’re going to lose your job,” and they will act accordingly, usually by spending office hours brushing up resumes and digging into Monster.

Programmers respond to fear by instinctively dreaming up ways of disemboweling the object of said fear, an obvious holdover from a teenage fascination with Dungeons and Dragons. So, you know, look at the disemboweling factor as a cautionary tale.

“Sometime when the crew is up against it, the breaks are beating the boys, tell them to get out there and give it all they got and win just one for the Zipper.”

Let me tell you something, I’m pretty good with the letters and the commas and whatnot, but I’ve never given what I consider to be a good motivational speech. This is because I find them phony and manipulative. Those self-help gurus, they’re all hiding something, something dark and likely actionable. Speeches have their place, I use them in coaching (the athletic kind, not the business kind), but their sole purpose should be to set fire to motivation that’s already there, not create it from scratch.

“Do or do not; there is no try.”

Tough love has its place too. But the one word people forget it “love.” There’s no place for love in business, and I mean that in every possible sense of either word. If you’re Yoda, you use this method because it’s one on one and you sorta helped mess this kid’s dad up real bad. You try that malarkey in the ready room on Yavin, and half those hillbillies walk out of there and find a quiet planet with not so much sand.

True motivation does not come from stirring speeches or incentive programs. This is doubly true for your techie types. While it’s true that we spend ridiculous amounts of disposable cash on gadgets, games, collections, cons, and toys, it pretty much ends there. We have no use for flashy clothes with trendy labels, cars that cost more than houses, and houses that cost more than islands. After a certain point, unless we do something crazy like have a kid or start a company, we max out our needs and hit cruise control.

“I am out of sticks. I am out of carrots”

The key to motivation, the thing that is always overlooked, is that true motivation is personal. One person’s $50 gift card to the Sharper Image is another’s stifling choke collar. Again, let me emphatically state that these things have their place, but to get the best out of the best, you have to do it on an individual level.

You can’t motivate someone you don’t know. You can stop them from jumping off a building, you can help them pick a major (and for you programmer wanna-be types, let me save you a bunch of time: Computer Science or 19th Century English Literature), and you can get them to spend a few bucks on a get rich quick program on cassette tape. If you really want them to succeed and come back the next day ready to rock, you have to build a rapport, get to know them, figure out what makes them tick, and apply the right kind of pressure.

Note: This is also a recipe for slowly and vengefully ripping out and crushing someone’s soul, so be very, very careful with this.

Once you do that, you can forget all of the self-help books, speeches, and other means of selling someone else’s awesome view of this totally rockin’ world. It’ll all come naturally at that point, and what’s more, it’ll last.

Joe Procopio is the founder of Intrepid Media, a technical and management consulting and services firm (intrepidmedia.net) and a publishing company/creative network (intrepidmedia.com). He is currently writing Gleaning the Cube, a collection of humorous techie columns that includes exclusive new material. You know what motivates Joe? Gushing, complimentary emails and/or lucrative offers for publication. He can be reached at joe@intrepidmedia.net.

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