Comment by jimbo808
1 day ago
I've only experienced de-motivation from managers, personally. At least for me, motivation comes from ownership, impact, autonomy, respect. You can cause me to lose motivation in a lot of ways, but you can't really cause me to gain motivation unless you've already de-motivated me somehow.
You can de-motivate me in a lot of ways, some examples:
- throwing me or a coworker under the bus for your mistakes
- crediting yourself for the work of someone else
- attempting to "motivate" me when I'm already motivated
- manufacturing a sense of urgency, this is especially bad if you try to sustain this state all indefinitely
- using AI or market conditions as a fear tactic to motivate the team
- visibly engaging in any kind of nepotism
Honestly this list could go on and on, but those are some that come to mind.
> manufacturing a sense of urgency, this is especially bad if you try to sustain this state all indefinitely
Sadly, I have seen this in almost every startup led by founders without an engineering background I've ever been a part of.
In my personal experience, this is often caused by overeager sales team promising the world for the next deal, only to fob it off to the engineering team who now "urgently" need to build "features" and "work hard" to make it happen. This is when your intrinsically motivated engineers start looking for the exit.
Also:
- not letting me have ownership of what I build and dictating features
- not giving me autonomy of how to solve a problem