Imagine developers being force fed a consistent sense of urgency and anxiety aimed to persuade them to work harder, longer hours and produce more, more, more. All this to benefit a profit fixated corporation which is obsessively refocusing itself to the bottom line.
The consequence is a team of unsatisfied developers followed by high turnover and a related cost of rehiring, training and knowledge transfer.
Although not intuitive at first, the efficiency of an in-house development team is lost. Eventually as the software product grows, this overhead will eat up any extra profits the in-house model naturally endows. This scenario actually hinders ROI ultimately contributing less to the bottom line.
Software development managers can do better than being “slave-drivers”. There is a more effective way to impact the bottom line by motivating a development team to increase ROI.
Last year Intel published an article outlining the hierarchy of developer motivation. They cite that the majority of developers are motivated when playing a creative role and gain a sense of achievement from the projects they work on.
![Hierarchy of developer motivation](https://software.intel.com/sites/default/files/Hierarchy-of-developer-motivations.png)
Another article by Rob Walling entitled Nine Things Developers Want More Than Money cites that developers want to exercise creativity and have a voice in the priorities of their team.
I won’t cover in this article how to setup a development team to exercise creativity. But it all starts with agile software development and you can read what a manager can do in my article about the manager’s role in agile software development.
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