Motivation, open source, and side projects 💡
Monday Ideas — Edition #130
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Back to this week’s ideas 👇
1) 🎯 Nurture both intrinsic and extrinsic motivation
Motivation is broadly categorized into two types:
🧠 Intrinsic motivation — comes from within. It's the personal satisfaction an engineer gets from solving a complex problem, learning a new technology, or seeing their code make a real-world impact.
🏆 Extrinsic motivation — involves external rewards or pressures, such as money, promotions, or recognition from peers and superiors.
You often hear that intrinsic motivation is good and extrinsic motivation is bad, but I personally believe you should strive for a healthy combination of the two.
We are humans, not ascetics, so there is nothing wrong with looking for validation, being happy when our peers appreciate us, or wanting to earn a lot of money.
In my experience, problems rather arise when one of these angles is too dominant:
People who are driven too much by extrinsic factors tend to adopt opportunistic behavior, feel more insecure, and prioritize short-term gains.
People who mostly care about intrinsic growth may overly focus on their own mastery, to the detriment of the overall team and business success.
As a manager, you should help both sides:
🔍 Understand — learn what motivates your teammates on an intrinsic level, so you can help them with their personal goals.
🚀 Incentivize — Create an environment where individuals have healthy extrinsic incentives to do great things, like achieving a common goal, recognition and a good career.
To figure out where you stand on this, think about your individual team members and ask yourself:
Do I know what motivates them? Can I answer with something specific for each of them?
Are their projects and duties aligned with what motivates them?
Not all tasks are pleasant, but you should always try to develop avenues of work (however small) that align to people’s aspirations.
More ideas on how to motivate your team 👇
2) 🤖 Open source vs AI coding workflow
Coding with the help of AI assistants, like ChatGPT or Github Copilot, genuinely feels like the future.
However, while these tools are undeniably useful, I am kind of concerned about how the software space will evolve in terms of workflow and innovation, as soon as they get mainstream.
Let’s take, for example, the classic open source workflow, and compare it with the emergent AI-fueled one.
With open source, people can open up issues about bugs and changes. These issues can be seen by everybody, there is little duplication, owners reply, people have a discussion, and so forth. On top of this, fixing a bug once fixes it for all users (granted they will update their version).
That looks like a good feedback loop to me.
Let’s compare it now to the current state of AI coding.
AI coding is not based on reusing the same code, like open source, but on creating new code every time. This is like code duplication at scale, and poses the same problems.
If the AI introduces a bug on something, it will do so for all users that request that code. Those users, in turn will each have to fix the same bug by themselves.
What’s worse, right now we have no way of making the AI learn from its mistakes + our corrections. There is no feedback loop.
So, while AI is surely going to provide incredible benefits, it is also going to change some core dynamics that so far have enabled innovation, open source, and much of the software ecosystem as we know it today.
We will have to wrap our heads around this to figure out what is the best, most productive way of using AI, while also making sure we are moving forward as an industry.
3) 📋 Side projects in your resume?
The goal of your resume is to get you to the first interview call, which is likely the screening. Then, of course, it’s on you — but a good CV can easily bring you 3x the interviews than a mediocre one. I know otherwise formidable engineers whose CV is a complete disaster. I would have passed on them, which is a tragedy.
There is debate about what other activities to put on your resume besides your work ones.
To me, the rule of thumb is that you should include anything that proves either good impact or good skill. Both is better, of course, but it’s ok to display projects that mostly demonstrate one of them.
About tech skills, common entries are a good stack overflow profile, your open source contributions, or research papers if you are a PhD. Technical side projects are ok granted they are not trivial:
Simple dashboard in React → No thanks
Small full-stack app to run a movie club with your friends → Yes!
Likewise, it’s ok to display non-tech interests granted they have real-world impact or display strong commitment. Examples I have seen are:
Running a non-profit association → impact
You run marathons → commitment
The best advice I can give on this is to treat your interests just like your work experience: be specific and focus on impact.
🥉 OK — “I like running”
🥈 Better — “I like running and I do marathons”
🥇 Best — “I like running. Last year I ran 2 marathons and this year I would like to do 4.”
A separate mention should be made for blogs and writing online in general. This is almost always useful. A good article can display both tech and communication skills and it’s a fantastic investment for your resume (other than your reputation, your network, etc.).
The minimum viable blog, to me, has at least two articles written over the last year. It’s ok for them to be short, like ~1000-words pieces, but I prefer two short pieces over a single, long one.
I wrote a full piece about how to create a great resume 👇
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Luca
Thanks Luca for the post.
About the first topic (“Nurture both intrinsic and extrinsic motivation”), I would suggest the following book: “Drive” written by Daniel Pink (https://amzn.eu/d/6ixsPxp - note that it has many translation).
I think it is well written and explain clearly the concept of the topic.