I was talking to a friend of mine yesterday, who works in a local e-commerce solutions provider. She was relating to me, with much gusto, how they were being pushed around by a big corporate client who wanted to get its feet wet in the local e-commerce arena, but were cutting profit margins to the bone. She said things like, "Eh ano pa kikitain namen non?" (How could we earn anything from that?) It was interesting because I couldn’t understand where the bad feeling was coming from … did she feel like she was being cheated by this client? Or that she was herself losing money on this deal? Because, the truth of the matter is, her paycheck is totally unaffected by the outcome of that one deal, so the only entity that is actually losing anything is "the Company."
I guess the issue I’m driving at here has to do with motivation. As someone who has never drawn a paycheck in his life, my motivation to work is fairly cut and dry. If I don’t do it, I don’t eat. If I don’t work hard, other people will take the projects that could have been mine. And if I don’t improve my skillset, I won’t be able to pitch for the high-end projects that pay more. So my motivation exists within a very simple, survival-of-the-fittest kind of setting.
What I don’t understand is employee motivation, because even if you work hard and try to improve yourself, your pay rate doesn’t necessarily change. In this country, promotions come at a much more regular pace (i.e., after 1, 2 or 5 years working with the same company), so theoretically, an outstanding worker and an average one will have roughly the same payrate given that they both stayed in a given company for X number of years. Sure you could get ahead by kissing some major ass, or joining Daddy’s company, but I’m talking about the baseline average here.
When you freelance, the results of laziness and ineptitude are in-your-face and hard to miss. If you don’t know how to program, you can’t make games. If you don’t know 3D, you can’t do post. And if you generally suck at what you do know how to do, you will find that the well of new projects will dry up pretty frickin’ fast.
I’ve worked with tons of companies full of programmers and designers that cared only about accomplishing the work in the easiest possible way. The other day I was in a meeting with a thoroughly jaded programmer who was tearing down every single one of the suggestions I had to improve their website. Why? Because doing it the right way doesn’t earn them any extra money. It’s all about the number of hours spent, and whether you had to go over-time or not.
On the other hand, I know a handful of people who flourish in the company setting and actually love their job. That’s the kind of motivation that I’d love to tap into, but it’s rare and is an exception more than a rule. The question on my mind is, how big a part does the money actually play in this equation? (I’m mostly thinking about the people who work to support themselves here, not the ones who still live with or off their folks; in that situation, any money you make is essentially gravy, so the scales are unfairly weighted, so to speak.)
If you didn’t like your job all that much, how much money would it take to keep you there? And if you really loved it, how little would you settle for? What’s your motivation?