Item — HN Reader

Developers—the good ones—don't want to work for you. They want to work for a cause. They want believe that their work will have real meaning; real impact. This is not instead of a good salary, this is in addition to.

But it's an important addition and often overlooked. It's why among all of the food delivery service startups recently, I have my eye on SpoonRocket. They are on a passionate mission to provide healthy meals at the same price and speed of fast food. That is something to get fired up about. That could have a huge impact. That could change the diet of millions of people.

Please, don't settle for a mission statement. Please don't stop at the point of a good idea and early revenue. Have a mission—a real one. It's not just to romance investors or customers. The biggest impact you'll see is in your people.

8 comments

Developers—the good ones—don't want to work for you. They want to work for a cause.

Agree strongly. I – like most of us – am approached by recruiters every single day who throw around buzz words like "disrupt" and "hacker" and (worst off all) "rockstar." None of that matters to me, though. The two most important things to me are 1) that I'm going to be happy at the end of the day, and 2) that my company is doing good. And I don't mean doing well, I mean doing good" – contributing in a positive way. I'm older, though (30).

Of course I want to improve my skill set and work with new/cool/innovative technologies, but I'm not going to do it for a company that I don't care about, or at the cost of my personal wellbeing.

Wow is 30 older? I'm 29, so that means I'm older too? I thought I was just a regular age.

Wow. 46, and trying to remember where I left my cane...

52. Got a rockin' cane. Don't remember where I got it from. Damn Alzheimer's...

I added that because I was providing a counter-point of sorts to michaelochurch's comment below, and he noted that he was "older" at 30.

I thought it was some kind of sarcasm. Confused, I went and googled SpoonRocket. It exists. This comment was not sarcasm.

You start your comment with "wanting to work for a cause" and end it with a sentence about a fucking food delivery startup being "something to get fired up about". It just blew my mind.

The cause is not delivery. The cause is healthy food that people can realistically purchase daily. Customers were the ones who (perhaps foolishly? Who knows?) traded away health for convenience by buying cheap fast food. SR attempts to eliminate the necessity of the tradeoff.

Welcome to the tech industry.

Mind, there are the occasional actual Causes we techies can work on, but those are almost uniformly so utterly underfunded that they can barely afford to hire paid engineers at all.

The Safety layer of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs is more important to me (age 37 and married with kids). As much as I would love to use my skills to contribute to humanity as a whole, the basic needs of someone in a similar phase of life must take care of the Safety layer first. However, I have found other ways to contribute to a cause (e.g., active in the community, charities, etc.)

I want to work on something I care about. It doesn't have to make the world a better place in general, it can be "I want to make this system faster at processing 'X'" or "I want to make things easier for the customer". Just something I can believe in or strive towards. In the grand scheme of things it can be really insignificant.

However if at least twice a month I'm asked to change the way the calendar on a page looks, I'm going to get tired of it real fast. It becomes clear that it's just wasted effort and a lack of planning. When it seems like all your effort is being ignored, unnecessary, or thrown away it just kills motivation.

The system I spend most of my time on right now is mostly, if you boil it down, some simple record keeping for insurance customers. It's usually not very sexy. But while working on it there have been scaling challenges, using external services like S3 or Zencoder to give users new functionality, and other complexities. There is usually something I want to sink my teeth into, and that's something that keeps me working on it. If it was an ultra-simple CRUD app that never had any additional features, I don't know how long I would want to work on it.

Maybe it's part of living in DC, but I've seen first hand a lot of organizations that do fantastic work and are a clearly a force for good in the world... but are terrible to their employees.

Believing in what you do is important (more important than money, IMHO) but you have to consider your specific role and responsibilities and the co-workers and office culture...

Developers—the good ones—don't want to work for you. They want to work for a cause.

Disagree strongly. Solving interesting problems, improving my skill set and my career, and doing good work for the people immediately around me is enough for me. Negative cause (e.g. working for an unethical company, or in the war industry) would be a problem; but the difference between neutral and positive means little to me. I'm older, though (30).

When I get to ownership level, perhaps starting my own thing, I'll care a lot about macroscopics. However, most of us start out as employees and there's more than enough rewarding in mastering the micro-scale stuff. As long as I'm not being asked to do anything wrong, I'm not going to get emotionally involved in how a company affects the world until I'm an owner; until that point, it's just a distraction.

Macroscopics, in my observation, just mean more Kool-aid; and there are just as many good people at companies doing less sexy (macroscopically speaking) but still important things. In fact, I worked (briefly) for one of those "change the world" startups-- a New York ed-tech that's devolved into being a sidekick to mainstream publishers-- and it was all marketing bullshit; the rank-and-file believed in it, but the executives were the most unethical people I've ever met (and that includes drug dealers).

Here's the way I see it: solving interesting problems is what motivates you to wake up and drive into the office every day. Being a part of a cause is what keeps you driving into that same office every day for five years.

Solving interesting problems will only get you so far. In fact, it will get you as far as the next company that comes along and dangles a nice raise in your LinkedIn inbox with the promise of solving interesting problems.

The cause is what creates long-term loyalty. For employers, maintaining this cause is the challenge. Causes are expensive. All too often, causes are set aside in the interest of profitability. To use Todd's example, this is when the food company realizes that people freaking love mac n' cheese and that they'll sell a lot more food if they stray from the cause and start serving the garbage that so many people love. Remember the early days of Google and "do no evil"? Yeah.

The point is - good developers want to care. They can get a good salary anywhere, but can you also make them care.

Some will want to work for a cause, some get fired up over cool algorithms, some care because they're best mates with the rest of the team and can grab a beer together.

But they want to care passionately about their work. That's the bottom line.

> good developers

I'm sure plenty of people feel passionately about something, but I don't see how that makes them "good" in any technical sense.

The Spocks will always be a better developer than McCoys.

The best developers I've ever known move around a lot, or work at places like Goldman Sachs. They have a clique, and it's well above any loyalty to some hip corporate mission statement.

The best developers I've ever known move around a lot, or work at places like Goldman Sachs. They have a clique, and it's well above any loyalty to some hip corporate mission statement.

Exactly. They care more about keeping their skills sharp than "change the world" mission statements, so they'd rather do machine learning at a hedge fund than grunt work for some 23-year-old kid whose family connections bought funding.

They start thinking about the big-picture passion stuff when they're owners. Before that point, it's not relevant. You care more about growing your skill set and doing good work for (and mentoring) the people around you.

Exactly. This is what kept me from giving up this profession for last 13 years. You got to enjoy what you produce. Contributing to a cause is a perk.

Well, if it's not a real mission—if it's marketing bullshit—you'll never fool your own people. They'll see through that in a second.

Graham Weston has a worhwhile TEDx presentation[1] that presents a more complete thesis on this subject. He raises three criteria: employees want to be a significant part of a winning team on an inspiring mission.

Nobody feels good changing the world if their own contribution isn't significant. Nobody want's to work for a change-the-world startup that can't execute or stay solvent.

But mission matters, even to employees. It's why (as he mentions) the #1 employer of ivy league graduates has horrible pay and really tough working conditions: Teach For America.

[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VAsLICK9vxc

>I'm older, though (30).

Are you and robbyking the same person?

I did a double take when I saw that. No, I'm not.

My cause is my mortgage.

Sorry, not picking on you specifically, but the HN meme of 'what we do is so important' is pretty tiring. My very first job, supporting cancer research, was actually probably pretty important in the scheme of things, and the owners were relentless about busting our chops if we started to take ourselves seriously. I liked that, and found it healthy.

So, a less flippant 'my cause' statement. I'm an engineer. I like solving hard problems. I work hard regardless of whether your business is "important" or not. Now maybe I'm falling into the 'hire somebody just like you' trap, but I'd far rather hire somebody motivated by solving problems, not somebody motivated by the extrinsics.

I am not saying you are wrong, but I am offering a counterpoint. Personally, I scoff at most of the job listings on here. 'Change the world with our personalized back scratching service' or whatever (only a tiny change from a lot of the actual job postings, I made it silly to avoid ticking off legitimate businesses). Tell me you want me to scale your back room, or your analytics are really hard and no one really knows how to extract meaningful data, or you are trying to get your latency down, or you are moving to GPU and CUDA to solve some computational problem. I'm there, I don't care too much if it is Santa Strike or cancer research (I care some, I am overstating things a bit to make a point).

I'm expecting some push back on this, and that's reasonable. I'll just point out that while I am not a pure blood capitalist, I do think the markets will tell you if what you do is 'important' in the form of success. Which is not to say really important things might fail in the market, they do. But if you are making money you are providing value to somebody, and that is, to my mind, enough reason to live and contribute. The world would be bleak indeed if we focused on very. serious. and. important. problems.

Semi-agree.

On the one hand, Working for a Cause is probably the most fundamental motivating factor behind work-ethic and one of the most powerful motivating factors for people in general.

On the other hand, you often need to take a step back and ask if your project really is a capital-C Cause. The vast majority of economically necessary work, after all, simply is not. Even double-digit percentage improvements in the reliability of cloud computing nodes, for instance, are not a Cause. They are a very economically significant piece of technological development that can make anyone who develops them a bunch of revenue. They are advantageous work that makes the world run a little bit better.

But they're not actually Saving the World or Bringing X to the Masses or anything emotional and epic like that. Worse, attempting to invoke big, epic emotional motivations when your work doesn't really have a Cause to justify those feelings just cheapens the entire trope of Causes, makes it come off as a nasty fiction told to unwitting dupes to make them allow further exploitation than ever before.

Fly your flag if you've got one, but don't feel ashamed to admit you might not have one.

To me it's about the craft, creating great software that really helps the user. That is the only challenge I really care about. The software I create is a byproduct of the process I use. I "carve wood" to make the furniture. Sometimes it's beautiful, sometimes it's new and innovative, sometimes not. But it's always enjoyable to me. I don't get attached to changing the world. I'm closing on 20 years doing this and I'll see another 20 more if I'm lucky. I may change the world, I may not. But I will create good software if I have anything to say about it. I think that should be the only real cause, to create great software and if anything, impact the craft in a positive way.