What Motivates You? A Dozen Factors to Consider

Here’s a list of factors that most people find important to consider as they search for a job. I urge you to have pen and paper at hand as you read and jot down what matters to you and a relative importance for each item. In addition to the factor’s importance, note the specifics of what is necessary for you.

Money

Money is perhaps the most obvious motivator, but it’s not always a matter of how much you can get. Money also comes in many different forms.

You need to know what your financial requirements are, and that means you must know what minimum base salary you need. Sometimes people say “Salary isn’t important, as long as the work is interesting,” but that’s just not true. Maybe you don’t have to make $200,000/year, but you wouldn’t work for $5/hour as long as the work was interesting, would you? You need to know what your bottom-line minimum is.

Money may not just be salary. Some companies may pay a yearly bonus, which may or may not be based on performance of either you or the company. Some may pay a signing bonus. All these factor into your total monetary compensation. Add a 401(k), discussed below, and you have many variables to juggle.

What to know: what minimum salary you require and what range you expect to make.

Benefits

Other forms of compensation figure into your financial needs. Maybe you have a family with specific health-care needs, so the type of health insurance offered makes a difference. To a healthy, single 25-year-old, this may be nearly irrelevant, compared to a 40-year-old with a 6-year-old daughter. The differences between HMO, PPO, and other group health insurance plans may make a big difference in your long-term happiness with a company.

Retirement plans like 401(k) and 403(b) that a company pays into are effectively free money. A job paying $50,000 that lets you max out your 401(k) at 10 percent that matches dollar for dollar is actually paying you $55,000. You’re receiving only $45,000 since $5,000 comes out of your paycheck, but $10,000 is going into your 401(k) account.

Stock and stock options are deferred compensation that relate to how well the company is doing. You may be offered perks like health club memberships, company cars, discounts on products the company sells, and so on. The number of ways that you can be paid are endless.

What to know: benefits you must have, including any specifics about types of health coverage you must have; amount of 401(k) participation you want to take advantage of; and any benefits important to you.

Location

Your workplace’s location is relevant in both a macro and micro sense. In the macro sense, if you’re in Iowa and plan on staying there, you’re not going to be searching for jobs in California (or at least jobs that require you to move to California). Your macrogeographic requirements may be based on family, climate, or any of a number of different factors.

In most cases, you’ll probably be looking for a job in the same general geographic area, but there are considerations there as well. Maybe you don’t want to have a commute longer than thirty minutes or to have to fight city traffic. Maybe a job in the hustle and bustle of a major city is something you can’t bear to imagine. Before you say “an hour in the car isn’t so bad,” consider that hour every morning and then every night on the way home after a hard day. For rail commuters, ask your commuting friends how many actually use the train time to “catch up on some reading.”

What to know: how far you are willing to commute every day, in terms of both distance and time, and in what form of transportation.

Pride and Prestige

For some, the allure of having a Google business card or being able to say “I work for Apple” can be intoxicating. If you’re one of those people, make sure you look at the situation with open eyes. Maybe you have sights set on Google, but once you look at it, Yahoo! is just as cool. The work itself may be the source of your pride. It may not matter if you’re working at Apple if you, or your friends, see your work as boring old sysadmin work.

If you think this sounds egotistical, stop and make sure that it doesn’t apply to you. Recognition from one’s peers is a powerful motivation, and there’s nothing wrong with it. Be honest with yourself in your assessment of what drives you.

Maybe it doesn’t matter what the work is if you can’t tell anyone. I have a friend who worked at a major hardware company who was telling me of work she was proud of but she couldn’t show me, because restrictions prohibited her from showing anyone outside of the company.

What to know: your internal motivators.

Important Work

After my two-month stint at the financial services company, I realized how important it was that my work was fulfilling to me. I felt good in what I was doing, helping school libraries, in a way that wasn’t there in a financial company. My friend Tom Limoncelli took a pay cut to work for a presidential candidate he believed in (see ​Politics​). Your motivators may be different.

At the other end, perhaps you don’t have any real motivators in who you would want to work for, but there are certain companies you would not work for, such as a military contractor, a tobacco company, or a seller of pornography. Although these may not be worth noting on your initial self-assessment of what you want, if you come across a company that raises this sort of flag in your mind, examine it carefully.

The type of work may make a difference as well. Perhaps you want to work on projects only for products or services that the company sells. Maybe you don’t want to work on accounting applications because that’s only back-room programming that isn’t important, or maybe you see accounting applications as a way to use your skills at envisioning information to help management increase profitability.

What to know: what “important” work looks like to you.

Type of Work to Be Done

The type of work may be different from what work is important. Programmers are often motivated by sexy products and projects. Maybe you’re the kind of programmer who hates working on back-end program internals, and you want to work only on sexy interfaces. Conversely, you could be like me, thriving on building infrastructure and tools on which others can hang their sexy interfaces.

Either way, it’s something you’ll want to know about by the time you leave the interview, if not before.

What to know: the kinds of projects that excite you and make you want to come to work each day.

Company Size/Department Size

Size of the company usually has a big effect on how things are done. Bigger companies tend to be more rule-bound. Smaller companies usually give employees more autonomy. Bigger companies may have more room for advancement, but it may be a more political process than in smaller ones. Bigger companies typically have onerous IT departments that lock down everything related to computer hardware and software. Smaller companies may not care what you run on your desktop.

On the personal level, you may be the type of person who wants to be a big fish in a small pond. You love it when people say, “I don’t know; go ask Susan about that, she’s the expert.” Conversely, you may prefer to go through your day just getting your work done and not standing out.

What to know: how big a company, a department, or a team that you want to work for.

Your Co-Workers

Do you need a well-oiled, high-performing team to make your life complete? Or can you get by with co-workers who fly below your soaring heights? How important is it to have co-workers who are more talented than you to challenge your skills? Do you get along with everyone? Or will one jerk on the team ruin your whole day?

The importance of social interactions at work can’t be ignored. You may think this: “I have a job to get work done, not have a social club.” Although that may be true, Maslow still puts it as one of the four basic human needs, not one of the two higher-order growth needs. You’ll be with your co-workers for forty hours a week or more, which may well be more waking hours than you spend with your spouse. Don’t discount this one. On the other hand, bad people come and go through good companies.

Technical challenges from one’s co-workers can also be an important part of job satisfaction. I’ve talked with many dissatisfied people who complain with this: “I hate being the smartest person in the place.”

What to know: who you want to work with and who you want to avoid.

Technology Used

Nothing affects a techie’s day-to-day work life more than the tools she has to use. Unless you’re ambivalent and are just as happy working in Windows with Visual Studio as you are running Emacs under Solaris, dig into this in your interview. (See ​Prepare Your Questions to Ask​.) However, don’t expect that the company will match your desires exactly. Maybe they use ksh instead of bash, or maybe they’re running on Macintoshes instead of Windows (if you’re lucky!). Any new job is going to take some adjusting to, and tech differences are part of that.

In fact, you may specifically look for differences as a motivator for the job. Maybe you’ve used only Linux in the past and the chance to work in a BSD environment would be a great addition to your résumé.

Sometimes the technology may be very limiting. Perhaps all machines in the company run only a very specific version of Windows, and free software is unheard of. Conversely, but also limiting, employees of the Free Software Foundation only use software that matches certain stringent licensing requirements.

What to know: what systems, languages, and other tools you enjoy using. What you want to learn going forward.

Autonomy and Direction

Techies tend to crave independence and autonomy more than most, sometimes to the degree where there can be grave misunderstandings between the employee and management. Some programmers consider a daily check-in from a project manager to say, “Hey, how’s the project going?” to be “micromanagement.” On the flip side, I have worked where the management was so hands-off that management let the programmers do whatever they wanted and hoped that something good came out of it.

What to know: imagine what a good relationship with management means to you.

Dress Code

This is much the same as autonomy, but it’s such a common concern among tech folks that it deserves a note of its own. The war with management over dress codes has been around since the first programmers came to work in torn jeans and a flannel shirt. Techs tend to hate ties and prefer to dress casually. The business world has drifted away from the button-down dress codes of decades past, and not just for programmers.

How comfortable do you have to be? Do you bridle at the thought of management telling you what you can and can’t wear? Any job at all, unless you work out of your house, is going to have a dress code of some kind, even if unwritten. Is it that important to be able to wear your Slayer 1997 tour T-shirt to work? If so, you limit your options, but make sure you know that about yourself.

What to know: your sartorial minimums. Whether you can get by wearing a tie every day. What about Dockers? Pantyhose?

Working Hours

Day in, day out, you’re going to have a schedule of some form. How much does the company’s schedule mesh with when you want to work?

Rigidity of the working schedule may make a difference. Can you work Monday through Friday from 7:45 to 4:15? How about whenever you want, so long as the work is done? Chances are you’ll get something that’s somewhere in the middle, although sysadmins and help desk staff with outward-facing responsibilities often have less flexibility.

Are you able to do weekend and after-hours work? What is “after-hours?” How much are people expected to work if not a rigid set of office hours? Are you seen as a slacker for working fewer than ten hours each day? What about being on call? Will you have to be available for crisis handling, even on a rotating basis?

Flexibility with family can be critical. Can you take some hours in the afternoon to go to your kid’s doctor appointment, or does it require paperwork and invocation of the Family and Medical Leave Act? What the job ad calls “family-friendly” may not meet your expectations.

What to know: you and your family’s requirements for how much time you can spend at the office and how flexible you need your company to be in relation to working hours.

And Many, Many More

The previous dozen issues are just to get you thinking about commonly considered aspects of employment. This list is hardly inclusive. Here are some others that may trigger ideas for your worksheet:

• Fun factor: Is the work fun or a drudge?

• Career advancement: Do you have a path to advance in the company? Or does that not concern you?

• Responsibility and/or power of the position: Is it important for you to lead, or are you happy creating the work?

• Personal growth/training/education: Where do you want to grow personally? Will the company support that?

• Company stability: Is the company likely to be around in the long term? What’s your tolerance for risk?

• Industry stability: Is the industry stable or subject to fluctuations in the economy?

• Stepping stone to future jobs: Do you need a certain kind of job to reach future goals?

You’ll come up with more as you work on your sheet. You’ll come up with even more as you search for a job. You’ll find yet more as you interview for a job. It’s a never-ending project, and you should treat it as such. Add and remove factors from your list, and change rankings as your discover more about yourself. People change, perceptions change, and certainly the job market changes.

Understanding what you want is an iterative process, just like writing software. You’ll create a first version, use it, see what you don’t like modify, and repeat.