HOWTO: Stay Motivated


How to Stay Motivated

It is a wonderful and surprising fact that programmers are highly motivated by the desire to create artifacts that are beautiful, useful, or nifty. This desire is not unique to programmers nor universal but it is so strong and common among programmers that it separates them from others in other roles

This has practical and important consequences. If programmers are asked to do something that is not beautiful, useful, or nifty, they will have low morale. There's a lot of money to be made doing ugly, stupid, and boring stuff; but in the end, fun will make the most money for the company

Obviously, there are entire industries organized around motivational techniques some of which apply here. The things that are specific to programming that I can identify are:
  • Use the best language for the job.
  • Look for opportunities to apply new techniques, languages, and technologies.
  • Try to either learn or teach something, however small, in each project.
Finally, if possible, measure the impact of your work in terms of something that will be personally motivating. For example, when fixing bugs, counting the number of bugs that I have fixed is not at all motivational to me, because it is independent of the number that may still exist, and is also affects the total value I'm adding to my company's customers in only the smallest possible way. Relating each bug to a happy customer, however, is personally motivating to me.

This has proven useful for me and I hope that it is useful for you too. Please check out the full page as indicated above.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Google South Africa's Telephone Number

Are you tired of searching for Google South Africa's contact details? You are pretty sure that their office is on the corner of Main Road and Sloane Street , but more than that, you just don't know. Well, @StewartMoss managed to dig up their telephone number - after first having to call Google UK and Google Kenya! So, directly from the Kenyan horse's mouth, here it is: Google South Africa's telephone number: +27-11-575-6000 Apparently, according to the receptionist, they "don't accept calls." So, there you go. You now have a telephone number for Google South Africa. I hope that you have better luck being put through to talk to someone than Stewart did. Thank you for this information and for calling Google UK, Kenya and South Africa Stewart, you rock!
Read more

A Way to Handle Raised Errors in Both Dynamic and Static SQL Code

If you've needed a reliable way to handle errors that might be raised in both dynamic and static SQL code, here is what I've been doing: SET   ANSI_NULLS   ON GO SET   QUOTED_IDENTIFIER   ON GO -- ============================================= -- Author:      Erland Sommarskog - http://www.sommarskog.se/error_handling_2005.html -- Create date: 2009/11/29 -- Description: **Call this sp from within your --              CATCH block** This --              reraises/throws the most recent --              error. Please see --              http://www.sommarskog.se/error_handling_2005.html --              for more details. -- -- Modifications: -- Author:      A. Jackson -- Create date: 2010/03/11 -- Description: Renamed the sp from --              "error_handler_sp" to --              "dba_Error_Handler" to conform --              to naming conventions. --            : Documented this sp. --            : Enhanced SQL readability. -- Author:
Read more

HOWTO: Generate a Random String of Characters in SQL

Here's a stored procedure to generate a string of random characters. This is useful when, for example, one needs to generate a random password. Please excuse the poor formatting, I am working on finding and implementing a decent code formatted for both SQL and C#. Thanks to  Raymond Lewallen  over at CodeBetter.com SET ANSI_NULLS ON GO SET QUOTED_IDENTIFIER ON GO -- ============================================= -- Author:            Raymond Lewallen --                    http://codebetter.com/blogs/raymond.lewallen/archive/2005/05/17/63281.aspx -- Create date: 2005/05/16 -- Description: Generate a random string of --                            given length. --                        : Everything is self-explanatory. --                        : Right now max length is set to --                            100. So anything between 1 and --                            100 will work for a length. --                        : If you specify a --                 
Read more