I once worked with two developers who joined our team at the same time.
The first developer—let’s call him Mark—was obsessed with levels and compensation. Every conversation circled back to promotions, competing offers, and total comp. He worked hard, sure, but you could tell his eyes glazed over during technical discussions unless they directly impacted his promotion timeline.
The second developer—let’s call her Sarah—was obsessed with the craft. She’d spend evenings learning Rust for fun. She volunteered to pair program with junior developers. She got genuinely excited about elegant solutions to gnarly problems. Promotions seemed like an afterthought.
Three years later:
Mark burned out and quit. He got his promotion but said the job “lost all meaning.” Last I heard, he’s bouncing between companies every 9 months, still chasing something.
Sarah is now a Staff Engineer and one of the most respected people on the team. She’s still learning for fun. Still energized by hard problems. And somehow, the promotions just kept happening.
Same environment. Different motivation. Completely different outcomes.
This is the difference between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. And understanding it might be the most important thing you learn about productivity and fulfillment.
What is Intrinsic vs Extrinsic Motivation?
Let’s start with the definitions:
Extrinsic Motivation: You do something to get an external reward or avoid a punishment.
Examples:
- Working for a paycheck
- Studying to pass an exam
- Exercising to look good for others
- Writing code to get promoted
- Networking to advance your career
Intrinsic Motivation: You do something because it’s inherently interesting, enjoyable, or meaningful to you.
Examples:
- Learning a programming language because you find it fascinating
- Exercising because movement feels good
- Reading because you love stories
- Refactoring code because you appreciate clean architecture
- Mentoring because helping others grow energizes you
The key difference: External reward vs. internal satisfaction.
The Surprising Science
Here’s where it gets interesting. For decades, conventional wisdom said:
“More rewards = more motivation = better performance”
Pay people more, and they’ll work harder. Offer bigger bonuses, and they’ll be more productive. Simple, right?
Then psychologists started actually testing this. The results were shocking.
The Candle Problem (1945)
Psychologist Karl Duncker created a simple problem:
You have a candle, a box of thumbtacks, and a box of matches. Attach the candle to the wall so that wax doesn’t drip on the table below.
The solution requires creative thinking: empty the thumbtack box, tack it to the wall, and use it as a shelf for the candle.
When researchers offered monetary rewards for solving it faster:
- For simple problems: Rewards improved performance
- For problems requiring creativity: Rewards HURT performance
People who were paid performed WORSE than people who weren’t.
The Deci Experiments (1970s)
Edward Deci ran a series of experiments that changed everything.
The setup:
Group 1: Paid to solve puzzles Group 2: Not paid, just given puzzles
During the experiment, both groups worked hard.
Then came the break:
“Take a break. Do whatever you want. The puzzles are still here if you want to keep playing.”
Results:
- Group 2 (unpaid): Kept solving puzzles during the break
- Group 1 (paid): Stopped immediately
The conclusion: Adding external rewards DECREASED intrinsic motivation.
They ran variations of this experiment dozens of times. The pattern held: Rewards can actually reduce motivation and performance on interesting tasks.
The Pink Study (2009)
Dan Pink popularized this research in his book “Drive,” consolidating decades of studies:
For mechanical tasks (following instructions, repetition):
- External rewards work great
- The more you pay, the better people perform
For cognitive tasks (creativity, problem-solving, learning):
- External rewards can backfire
- They narrow focus, reduce creativity, and kill intrinsic motivation
- Autonomy, mastery, and purpose matter more than money
The implication for knowledge workers (like software engineers): We’re almost entirely doing cognitive work. Which means extrinsic motivation is often the wrong tool.
Why Extrinsic Motivation Backfires
Let me share how I’ve seen this play out in real teams.
The Overjustification Effect
The pattern:
You enjoy something → External reward is added → You now do it for the reward → Reward is removed → You no longer enjoy it
Example from my career:
I loved writing technical documentation. I’d voluntarily write guides, create diagrams, and help onboard new engineers. It was fun. I liked organizing knowledge.
Then management introduced a “Documentation Champion” award: $1,000 bonus for the best documentation contributor each quarter.
What happened:
- I started writing docs to win the award
- Other people started competing
- The docs became performative (optimized for appearing comprehensive, not for usefulness)
- I won once, then didn’t win the next quarter
- I stopped writing docs
The reward killed what was previously intrinsic motivation.
Before the award, I wrote docs because I enjoyed it. After the award, I wrote docs to win. When I stopped winning, I stopped writing.
This is the overjustification effect: External rewards can replace internal motivation, and when the external rewards stop, the motivation disappears entirely.
The Short-Term vs Long-Term Problem
Extrinsic motivation is great for short bursts:
- “Finish this project by Friday and we’ll go out for drinks!” → Works
- “Ship this feature and you’ll get a $5k bonus!” → Short-term productivity boost
- “Win this hackathon for the prize!” → High energy
But it’s terrible for sustained effort:
The problem: Once you get used to external rewards, you need bigger and bigger rewards to maintain the same level of motivation.
My experience:
At one company, they introduced quarterly bonuses for hitting OKRs.
Quarter 1: $2,000 bonus → Everyone worked hard, felt motivated
Quarter 2: $2,000 bonus → Felt normal, expected
Quarter 3: $1,500 bonus (company revenue was down) → Everyone complained, felt demotivated, like they’d been “punished”
Quarter 4: Back to $2,000 → Felt like “barely fair”
The pattern: Extrinsic rewards create a hedonic treadmill. You adapt to them. Then you need more to maintain motivation.
The Narrowing Effect
Rewards narrow focus.
When you’re working for a reward, your brain optimizes for getting the reward as efficiently as possible—not for learning, creativity, or quality.
Example:
Scenario 1: Intrinsic motivation “I want to learn how React’s reconciliation algorithm works because it’s fascinating.”
Result: Deep exploration, reading source code, understanding edge cases, appreciating the design decisions
Scenario 2: Extrinsic motivation “I need to learn React to pass the technical interview next week.”
Result: Memorizing common patterns, doing practice problems, optimizing for passing the specific test
The difference: Intrinsic motivation leads to deep, flexible understanding. Extrinsic motivation leads to narrow, goal-specific knowledge.
The Autonomy Kill
Rewards signal: “Do exactly what I want, and I’ll reward you.”
This kills autonomy. And autonomy is one of the strongest intrinsic motivators.
When I worked at a startup with very little direction (just problems to solve), I was incredibly motivated. I had autonomy over my solutions.
When I worked at a corporation with detailed requirements and approval processes, I felt like a code monkey. I was told exactly what to build, how to build it, and when to ship. The extrinsic reward (salary) was higher, but my intrinsic motivation was crushed.
The research confirms: People with autonomy are more motivated, more creative, and more satisfied than people who are tightly controlled—even when the controlled group is paid more.
Why Intrinsic Motivation is Superior
Okay, enough about what doesn’t work. Let’s talk about what does.
Intrinsic Motivation is Sustainable
Extrinsic: You need constant external rewards to maintain motivation
Intrinsic: The activity itself provides the reward. It’s self-sustaining.
Sarah (from the opening story) didn’t need promotions to stay motivated. She was genuinely interested in the work. That curiosity sustained her through years of growth.
Mark needed constant external validation. When promotions slowed down, his motivation collapsed.
Sustainability matters for long-term careers.
You’ll spend decades as an engineer. You can’t rely on external rewards for that entire time. You need to find intrinsic satisfaction in the craft.
Intrinsic Motivation Leads to Better Quality
When you’re intrinsically motivated, you care about the work itself—not just completing it.
Example:
Extrinsically motivated engineer:
- Writes code to close the ticket
- Minimum viable solution
- Ships quickly to hit deadline
- Moves on immediately
Intrinsically motivated engineer:
- Writes code to solve the problem elegantly
- Considers edge cases
- Refactors for clarity
- Thinks about future maintainability
- Takes pride in the craftsmanship
Guess whose code is easier to maintain three years later?
Intrinsic Motivation Enables Deep Work
Cal Newport’s “Deep Work” concept: Prolonged periods of focused, undistracted work on cognitively demanding tasks.
You can’t do deep work if you’re extrinsically motivated.
Why? Because deep work is hard. It requires sustained focus. It’s often frustrating. There are no immediate rewards.
If you’re extrinsically motivated, you’ll constantly be asking: “Is this moving me toward my reward?” When the answer is unclear, you’ll disengage.
If you’re intrinsically motivated, the challenge itself is engaging. You’ll push through difficulty because the work is inherently interesting.
Example from my life:
I once spent three weeks debugging a gnarly concurrency issue. No glory, no immediate promotion value, no external reward.
But the problem was FASCINATING. The more I dug in, the more interesting it became. I couldn’t stop thinking about it.
I finally solved it, and the satisfaction was enormous—not because of external validation, but because I’d solved a genuinely hard problem.
That’s intrinsic motivation. And it’s the only way I’d have stuck with it for three weeks.
Intrinsic Motivation Correlates with Life Satisfaction
Here’s the research that really matters:
People who are primarily intrinsically motivated report:
- Higher life satisfaction
- Better mental health
- Stronger relationships
- Greater sense of meaning
- More resilience during setbacks
People who are primarily extrinsically motivated report:
- Lower life satisfaction
- More anxiety and depression
- Worse work-life balance
- Less sense of meaning
- Quicker burnout
The data is clear: Extrinsic motivation might get you promotions, but intrinsic motivation gets you fulfillment.
The Self-Determination Theory Framework
Edward Deci and Richard Ryan developed Self-Determination Theory (SDT) to explain what drives intrinsic motivation.
Their conclusion: Three universal psychological needs
When these needs are met, intrinsic motivation flourishes. When they’re not, people rely on extrinsic motivation (and suffer for it).
1. Autonomy
The need: Control over your work, decisions, and direction.
What kills it:
- Micromanagement
- Rigid processes
- “Do exactly what I say”
- No input in decisions
What enables it:
- Ownership over problems, not just tasks
- Trust to make decisions
- Flexibility in approach
- Influence over direction
Example:
Low autonomy: “Use Redux for state management. That’s the standard.”
High autonomy: “We have a state management problem. What do you think we should use and why?”
2. Competence
The need: Feeling effective and capable. Making progress. Mastering skills.
What kills it:
- Tasks that are too easy (boredom)
- Tasks that are too hard (overwhelm)
- No feedback on progress
- No recognition of growth
What enables it:
- Challenges just beyond current skill level
- Regular feedback
- Visible progress
- Opportunities to level up
Example:
Low competence: Doing the same CRUD operations for three years with no new challenges
High competence: Progressively harder problems that stretch your skills, with mentorship to help you grow
3. Relatedness
The need: Connecting with others. Being part of something larger than yourself.
What kills it:
- Working in isolation
- Toxic team culture
- Individual competition
- No sense of shared mission
What enables it:
- Collaborative work
- Shared goals
- Supportive relationships
- Feeling like you’re contributing to team success
Example:
Low relatedness: Working alone on a feature no one cares about
High relatedness: Pair programming with a teammate to solve a problem that helps real users
The SDT insight: When you have autonomy, competence, and relatedness, you don’t need extrinsic rewards. The work itself is motivating.
How to Cultivate Intrinsic Motivation
Alright, practical time. How do you actually build intrinsic motivation?
Strategy 1: The Curiosity Mapping Exercise
Most engineers stumble into their interests. This exercise makes it deliberate.
The practice:
Every week, track what makes you curious. Not what you “should” learn. What you actually want to learn.
My list from a recent week:
- Why is Rust’s borrow checker designed the way it is?
- How do distributed databases handle consensus?
- What makes a good CLI tool design?
- How do senior engineers approach system design differently?
Then: Pick ONE and spend 2 hours exploring it. Not to complete a course. Not to get certified. Just to satisfy your curiosity.
What happens: You start associating learning with curiosity, not obligation. That’s intrinsic motivation.
Strategy 2: The “Why” Stack
When you catch yourself doing something purely for external reasons, dig deeper.
The practice:
Ask “why” five times to find the intrinsic core.
Example:
“Why am I working on this feature?”
- “To close the ticket.”
“Why do I want to close the ticket?”
- “To look productive.”
“Why do I want to look productive?”
- “To get promoted.”
“Why do I want to get promoted?”
- “To feel respected and valued.”
“Why do I want to feel respected and valued?”
- “Because I want to know my work matters.”
The insight: The extrinsic goal (promotion) is masking an intrinsic need (meaningful work).
The better approach: Find work that directly fulfills the intrinsic need, rather than chasing extrinsic proxies.
Strategy 3: The Craft Development Plan
Instead of: “How do I get promoted?”
Try: “How do I become exceptionally good at something I find fascinating?”
The practice:
Pick a specific skill/domain you’re genuinely curious about. Commit to deepening your expertise for its own sake.
My example:
I became fascinated by observability and monitoring. Not because it was trendy. Not for promotion. But because the problem space was interesting.
I spent a year:
- Building custom monitoring solutions
- Learning about metrics, tracing, and logging
- Reading papers on distributed tracing
- Experimenting with different tools
Result: I became the go-to person for observability. Promotions followed naturally. But more importantly, I spent a year deeply engaged in work I found meaningful.
The pattern: Mastery for its own sake leads to better outcomes than grinding for promotion.
Strategy 4: The Autonomy Audit
Evaluate your current work:
Rate these 1-10:
- Do I have control over WHAT I work on?
- Do I have control over HOW I approach problems?
- Do I have control over WHEN I work?
- Do I have input into team/product decisions?
If your scores are low, you have two options:
Option 1: Create autonomy within constraints
Even in rigid environments, you can find pockets of autonomy:
- “I have to build this feature, but I can choose the implementation approach”
- “I have to attend these meetings, but I can choose how I prepare and contribute”
- “I have to work these hours, but I can choose what I learn during downtime”
Option 2: Change your environment
If you truly have no autonomy, and the company won’t budge, consider moving to an environment that offers more.
Intrinsic motivation is nearly impossible without autonomy.
Strategy 5: The “No Gold Stars” Month
For one month, do work without seeking external validation.
The rules:
- Don’t ask for feedback on every small thing
- Don’t share accomplishments on Slack/LinkedIn
- Don’t check if people liked your PR
- Don’t measure your worth by praise received
The goal: Break the addiction to external validation so you can reconnect with internal satisfaction.
What I learned when I tried this:
Week 1: Uncomfortable. I kept wanting to share wins.
Week 2: Started noticing what work I actually enjoyed vs. what work I did for validation.
Week 3: Felt more grounded. Less anxious about others’ opinions.
Week 4: Realized I’d been outsourcing my sense of accomplishment to others. Started trusting my own judgment more.
After the month: I still shared work and received feedback, but I was less dependent on it for motivation.
Strategy 6: The Impact Connection
Sometimes work feels meaningless not because it’s extrinsically motivated, but because the impact is invisible.
The practice: Regularly connect your work to real impact.
Examples:
- Read customer feedback on features you built
- Talk to users who benefit from your work
- Understand how your backend API enables the frontend team
- See how your code review comments helped a junior developer grow
My story:
I once spent months building infrastructure that no one would ever “see.” It felt abstract and meaningless.
Then I talked to the team that used the infrastructure. They told me it saved them 10 hours per week, allowed them to ship features faster, and reduced their stress.
Suddenly, my work felt meaningful. Same work, same pay, but now I had an intrinsic reason to care.
Strategy 7: The Side Project Test
The ultimate test of intrinsic motivation: What would you build if no one ever saw it and you gained nothing from it?
My side projects that revealed intrinsic interests:
- A CLI tool for personal task management (because I found CLI design fascinating)
- A blog about learning in public (because I enjoyed synthesizing what I learned)
- A small open-source library (because I wanted to solve a problem elegantly)
None of these directly advanced my career. None made me money. But all were deeply satisfying.
The insight: Your side projects reveal what you’re intrinsically motivated by. Then you can shape your career toward those things.
The Reality: You Need Both
Here’s the nuance that’s often missing from these discussions:
You can’t be 100% intrinsically motivated all the time. And you shouldn’t be.
Extrinsic motivation has its place:
- You need money to live → Working for a salary is rational
- Some tasks are boring but necessary → External pressure helps you do them
- Competition can be energizing → Extrinsic motivation can provide structure
The goal isn’t to eliminate extrinsic motivation. It’s to ensure intrinsic motivation is the primary driver.
The balance I aim for:
- 70% intrinsically motivated (doing work I find genuinely meaningful/interesting)
- 30% extrinsically motivated (doing necessary-but-boring tasks, responding to deadlines, etc.)
When that balance flips—when I’m primarily extrinsically motivated—that’s when burnout approaches.
Warning Signs You’re Too Extrinsically Motivated
Pay attention to these red flags:
Red Flag #1: You Constantly Think About Your Next Level
If you’re always thinking “when I get to X level, then…” you’re probably over-indexed on extrinsic motivation.
Red Flag #2: You Dread Monday
If you genuinely dread going to work, and the only thing keeping you there is compensation/prestige, that’s a sign.
Red Flag #3: You Stop When No One’s Watching
If you only work hard when your work is visible to managers, that’s extrinsic motivation.
Red Flag #4: You Can’t Remember the Last Time You Were Genuinely Excited About a Technical Problem
If work is just a series of tickets to close, and you feel no curiosity or engagement, that’s a bad sign.
Red Flag #5: You Measure Your Worth by External Metrics
If your sense of value is entirely tied to level, compensation, and peer comparison, you’re in dangerous territory.
How to Fix Your Motivation (If It’s Broken)
If you recognize yourself in the warning signs, here’s a reset process:
Step 1: Acknowledge Where You Are
“I’m primarily extrinsically motivated right now. I’m working for the paycheck/promotion/prestige, and I’ve lost connection with intrinsic satisfaction.”
Say it. Write it. Own it.
Step 2: Identify Past Intrinsic Interests
“When was the last time I was genuinely excited about work?”
Go back to that time. What were you doing? What made it engaging?
Step 3: Run Small Experiments
Don’t quit your job or make dramatic changes. Run small experiments:
- Pick one problem you find interesting (even if it’s “not important”)
- Spend 10% of your time on it
- See if the curiosity returns
Step 4: Have the Career Conversation
Talk to your manager:
“I want to work on problems that involve [X]. Is there a way to align my work with that?”
Sometimes, the answer is yes. Sometimes, it’s no. But you won’t know until you ask.
Step 5: Consider a Change (If Needed)
If your environment makes intrinsic motivation impossible:
- Every task is prescribed
- No autonomy
- No interesting problems
- Toxic culture that kills curiosity
Then maybe it’s time to find an environment that enables intrinsic motivation.
Life is too short to spend 40+ hours per week doing work that only matters because of a paycheck.
The Long-Term View: Building a Career on Intrinsic Motivation
Here’s what I’ve learned over 10+ years:
The people who last—and who seem genuinely happy—are the ones who found intrinsic motivation.
They’re not the ones who optimized for levels and comp. They’re the ones who stayed curious, pursued mastery, and found work that felt meaningful.
Sarah (from the beginning) is still thriving because she never lost her love for the craft.
Mark burned out because he was always chasing external validation, and that’s exhausting.
The paradox: Chasing extrinsic rewards directly often fails. But pursuing intrinsic satisfaction often leads to extrinsic rewards as a side effect.
When you’re deeply engaged in meaningful work, you naturally:
- Get better at your craft
- Take initiative
- Collaborate effectively
- Build a reputation
- Get opportunities
And yes, you get promoted and paid well. But those are byproducts, not the goal.
The inverse is rarely true. Chasing promotions directly rarely leads to fulfillment.
Final Thoughts
If I could give my younger self one piece of career advice, it would be this:
Find work you’d do even if no one was watching. Then figure out how to get paid for it.
That’s intrinsic motivation. And it’s the only sustainable path to a long, fulfilling career in tech.
The promotions will come. The money will come. But if you’re not intrinsically motivated by the work itself, you’ll just end up like Mark—successful on paper, but empty inside.
So ask yourself:
What would you work on if there were no promotions, no prestige, no external rewards?
Whatever that answer is—find a way to do more of that.
That’s where the magic is.
What intrinsically motivates you in your work? And if you’ve lost that spark, what’s one experiment you could run this week to reconnect with it?