For those confused by the topic, this high is what developers usually feel and this is what keeps them motivated and driven even after long stressful hours of coding, debugging – with/without cursing, and of course, the time spent on making the stuff work on I.E. (for web developers).
Having worked at multiple places in different demographics, I have seen far too many cases of burnouts, depressions and high levels of professional dissatisfaction proliferating into personal lives.
Here at DD, there are certain principles that we try to instill into each employee and based on these parameters the performance is judged.
Participate: Speak Up! Being a technology startup, we encourage and well sometimes enforce employees to be proactive rather than reactive in nature. There is no such thing as a fresher, and questions are more than welcome. Meetings are supposed to be well collaborated with an agenda and everyone is asked their opinions. Lack of punctuality is taken very seriously. The developer has to be allowed to get close to the business processes and give his thoughts. Gone are the days when a developer would be confined to corner!
Collaborate: Sharing is caring! There is nothing better than a developer being appreciated by his team mates, keeping this in mind we promote the use of internal knowledge bases which are populated by each and every member based on their findings. It is also an excellent way to see the mental direction of the firm for the senior management.
Retrospect: Everyone likes feedback! Keep track of all developer activities. Create well-defined, well-explained tasks for each developer, and make sure all tasks carry different difficulty levels. After every release, do a detailed analysis for each developer. There are multiple tools available in the market for this purpose. Have a session with each developer explaining the numbers and be realistic with your expectations.
Research: Nothing like a hard problem! This is what is the differentiating factor between average and great employees. Given a challenge most of them would end up having cold feet and the remaining few is the kind of ones we love. Keep giving challenging work (maybe a feature you have envisioned) every now and then to keep the developer from becoming complacent and keeping him on his toes.
Space: It’s about having fun! No one likes to work in a quiet, boring, lifeless place. Keep throwing in surprises every once in a while. Encourage employees to work on some of their own projects and take new courses (thanks to Coursera and Skillshare).
Follow the above prescription in the correct dosage. Incorrect quantities may lead to developers OD (which I will discuss in the future).