Job Satisfaction

About this Episode

Today's conversation delves into the multifaceted topics of learning, motivation, and engagement, shedding light on their relevance in both professional and educational spheres. The panelists scrutinize various job satisfaction elements, such as advancement, compensation, and engagement, with David notably challenging conventional wisdom on compensation, asserting that its importance diminishes once basic needs are fulfilled, and further arguing that increased compensation may actually hinder performance in cognitive tasks.

The discussion then shifts to the exploration of engagement, centering on the acronym NICU (Novelty, Interest, Challenge, Urgency) as pivotal factors for maintaining investment in work. David and Mark reflect on their educational journeys and the transformative power of innovative teaching strategies. They illuminate the nuanced balance between engagement and disengagement, investigating the subtle boundaries between motivation and procrastination, and examining how an overwhelming workload can erode one's connection to their tasks.

Transcript:

DAVID: Hello and welcome to the Acima Developer Podcast. I'm your host today, David Brady. Today we have a fun panel of Eddy Lopez, Ramses Bateman, and Mark Hymowitz on board. And we're going to talk about job satisfaction and what you can do to find a job that you're satisfied with or that you could be more satisfied with. And I have a lot of thoughts and opinions on this. And I'd really like to hear from some other people before I stand up on the soapbox and start preaching. What do you guys think? What makes a good job?

EDDY: We mostly try to figure out, like, what makes the job fulfilling for you, or, like, what do you like about the job?

DAVID: I would say that's the first question you actually have to answer, right? Because I've worked at jobs where I was working on bleeding-edge technology from the future. I mean, we were strapping hover boots onto the cow. It was awesome. And I've also worked on jobs where it's just knuckle-dragging, mind-numbing work that, you know, from enterprise stuff from 20 years ago and not solving any interesting problems. But, boy, we were making the company money.

It might surprise you to know that the technically challenging job was not very satisfying to me, and the mind-numbing job was immensely satisfying. I personally would say if we're going to talk about job satisfaction, I would say it needs to correlate directly to your happiness as a human being. Eddy, since you asked, basically, just for a split on that, let's start with saying what makes a job satisfying?

EDDY: Personally, I got to be able to see movement, if that makes sense. Like, the moment I become stagnant and I feel like I'm stuck is where I start to lose interest, right?

DAVID: Yeah.

EDDY: Versus if they tell me, "Hey, this is your path. This is your course for success," and I can work towards that path, to me, that gives me the motivation I need in order to push forward and do my research and become better at my job. So, as long as I have a path for advancement and not a lateral movement, I'm pretty happy about that. So that's my primary reason for job satisfaction.

A lot of it also has to do with, like, the work dynamic, the relationship between me and my peers, other sub-teams, you know, flexibility, time management, et cetera. But my primary one really is advancement.

DAVID: Yeah, no, that totally makes sense.

MARK: For me, I guess it would be to be able to look back and say, "Hey, this is what I've achieved so far." I like, for example, the Jira ticket system because it lets me kind of go back and see, wow, I've done all this over time. And I am achieving something every week or with every assignment. Doing a job where you're just mind-numbingly doing the same thing every day or seeing little results from it, for me, it's kind of off-putting. Being able to see that I'm growing and achieving something.

DAVID: Yeah, it's interesting to have, like, younger perspectives and older perspectives and to hear myself in your answers. I remember being very, very excited in my 20s to be working on just, you know, high-tech, just amazing, you know, crazy stuff. And I got really surprised by working on some jobs that were kind of cutting-edge, bleeding-edge technology, and I ended up very unhappy at those jobs.

I want to be clear here; the high-tech, cutting-edge was not what made me unhappy. Since then, I have worked on stuff that was just immensely fulfilling that was also, you know, new. But I was really surprised that I'm like, hey, why isn't there a strong correlation here between what I'm working on? Because I came out of there...the job that I'm thinking of, we were working on hardware. The NVIDIA GeForce had just come out, and I was working at a competitor company to them. So, people didn't know what the GeForce could do. They didn't know about hardware graphics acceleration.

And I was working at a company that made 3D graphics hardware acceleration back when nobody else was doing it. So, we were working on version 3.0. And it was an okay job. But it was, like, really, really disappointing when things folded up, and I, you know, ended up on the [inaudible 04:25]

So, the job that I went to after that, I ended up working in Java, which was not my favorite language. Java is very much a, you know, for me, it's, this is how we used to write software kind of language. It's like you're going back in time to pick up Java. Although, to be fair, this was 2006, and Java was actually, you know, fairly cutting edge. But I loved that job, even though I spent most of my job writing a database driver.

Like, we were writing a full-stack application to do, you know, travel reservations for people in high adventure, like, white water rafting reservations. Like, we could book you a seat on a raft that was going down the Colorado River. It was really kind of exciting, you know, kind of cool stuff.

And I was writing the low-level stuff to synchronize two separate databases to keep them in sync when they would be physically disconnected for up to 72 hours from each other. Like, you literally had people selling products out of the same database on two different servers that can't talk to each other because one of the databases is on a laptop up the river, literally up the river, with a paddle, with a whole truck full of paddles but no Wi-Fi. No way to get on the Internet.

And so, like, the river guide would jump on the river, and he's selling stuff to people, which I realize sounds really, really weird, right? But, like, people would show up at the launch spot and say, "Hey, do you have any open seats that we could get at a discount?" He's like, "Yeah, sure, not a problem." And so, he had to be able to sell that from his laptop.

So, I ended up having to synchronize databases that were, you know, disconnected for, like, you know, up to 72 hours. And it was the most fun I've ever had. It was just, like, grindy bit twiddling, you know, garbage coming in, writing our own read-write, you know, splitting adapter that would read from multiple, you know, multiple read databases but always send the updates to the same master if possible.

I don't know if it was mind-numbing, but it definitely...if it weren't mind-numbing...The other half of the application was accounting. So, we literally were writing finance tables, like, you know, credit and debit into an account. And what's the current balance? And what's the report for tax season? Another thing that a lot of programmers don't find, you know, exciting.

And I guess I will go ahead and spill the beans. I will let you guys know my secret, and that is there's a saying that you'll hear in this industry which is, "People don't quit their jobs; they quit their manager." And if you've ever had a terrible job and you think back to it, it probably wasn't the work that you hated. It was probably your boss or your boss's boss that you actually hated.

I've met people who cleaned out sewer lines, okay. Their job was literally to shovel crap, right? We joke about that; oh my, I'm just going to go shovel crap at the software mines. No, these people were shoving literal crap. And they loved their job because their boss knew this is hard, filthy, thankless work. And we are good people. We work hard, we get paid, and we go home. The boss took care of his people. And his people were like, yeah, the job stinks, like, literally, but metaphorically, it's a fantastic job. I love my job. And it's surprising to hear. Like, you're doing the worst job I can think of, and you're happy in that job? And yeah, yeah, they were.

So, I came across a piece of advice back in my late teens, which changed my world. I was about to head off to college. And this guy...I basically heard this guy talking. And he said, "If you have the choice between taking a super interesting class or signing up for the most amazing teacher that you've ever heard about, like, you've heard about the class. You've heard about the teacher, and that teacher is not teaching that class. You can either take the coolest class, or you can go with the coolest teacher."

He just hammered on the lectern and said, "Take the teacher. Take the teacher every time." Because a bad teacher will make that awesome subject terrible, a bad teacher will make you hate that awesome subject. And the cool teacher could be teaching, you know, basket weaving 101 or just the most mind-numbing, you know, dreaded, boring points of industry legal factions in 1600 Europe, right?

And you come out of that at the end of the semester going, oh my gosh, can you believe the legal implications of the 60 or 70 century Europe? And everyone looks at you like you're crazy because who cares? And the reason you care is because you had this amazing teacher. Oh, and by the way, you also got an A because you loved the work, and you got passionate about it, and you went nuts for it. And it's the people that you work with, not the actual work.

And I think a lot of people, when they're first starting out their career, they jump on the best work, and that's great. Like, if you don't know what to do and you don't know anybody in the industry, yeah, take, you know, take the most interesting work. But if you have the option to go to work for somebody who's amazing...and that job where I was doing database synchronization was the first time I'd worked with somebody who was the most amazing leader I had ever worked for.

Like, this guy he was not a good manager. He could not keep a schedule organized to save his life. But his leadership skills, man, we would crawl over broken glass for this guy just for the chance to lick a light socket for him. I remember telling him at one point...he was traveling on the road half the time, and the office was falling apart. And he's like, "What can I do to help you guys?" And I said, "Rodney, I don't know what you do here. I just know I need you here doing it because when you're here, nothing goes wrong, and everybody is happy. And when you're gone, everything goes wrong, and everybody is miserable."

Yeah, it was because he was just the most amazing leader. When he was in the building, you felt safe taking risks. You felt empowered to get something done. You could get meaningful things done; important things could get done. And, yeah, we were closing tickets left, right, and center when Rodney was in the office. And when he wasn't, every ticket seemed to grow new heads of, like, well, we solved this, but there's this edge case that we didn't consider.

And why a good leader made it so that tickets spawned more and more edge cases versus just closing them and getting them done, I still, to this day...I'm in my 50s now, and I still could not tell you why that happened. All I can tell you is that it did. And I worked for him for a year, and I had, like, consistent data. He would travel for three weeks, and everything would fall apart. He'd come back, and everything would get better. And then he'd travel, and it would all fall apart again. It wasn't, like, a sample size of, like, one weekend in November. It was a full year of this guy. And it's amazing.

So, yeah, if you have the chance to work on a great project or if you have the chance to work for a great team or with a great manager, take the people every time. Take the people. That's my big spill-the-beans secret for the podcast. So, I'm done. What do you guys want to talk about? [laughs]

RAMSES: In regards to this job satisfaction, one of the things where I feel satisfied about my job is, or most satisfied about my job, is when I'm learning something. I feel like if I do something for too long and I don't learn anything; I just get bored with it.

DAVID: Yeah, it gets mind-numbing, right? You're just, like, ugh. I've always been an autodidact, somebody who teaches themselves constantly. And I've literally had a boss tell me, "I'm not paying you to learn. I'm paying you to get stuff done." And I just had to laugh. So, what I did is I just made sure I was learning when he couldn't see me because every single week, he would sit down, and he'd say, "Well, I want you to do this." And he would name something that had never been done in our industry. Nobody knew how to do it. So, he was actually paying me to learn. I just thought it was ironic that he thought he wasn't.

EDDY: Yeah, that's me every day.

MARK: That's why we're working here. We're being paid to learn, and we're using our knowledge to build up Acima.

DAVID: Absolutely.

EDDY: I think what's also really important is having someone give you the patience, you know, that you need in order to get over the hump or something that you're stuck in. And I'm indebted to so many people [laughs] at Acima. It's insane. Like, I couldn't have gone as far as I have now had it not been for my peers having the patience and the willingness to help me. I think that's attributed a lot to my satisfaction here thus far.

DAVID: Yeah. I think I've said this before, maybe not on the podcast. But I've never seen a company with such an aggressive in-house career pipeline. Ramses and Eddy, were you both in customer support, customer service before moving into QA, before moving into engineering? Didn't you guys both come from QA or support into development?

RAMSES: Yeah.

DAVID: Yeah, that's rare.

EDDY: Not quite. [laughs]

DAVID: Not quite?

EDDY: Not quite. I'm almost there, but not quite.

DAVID: You're moving into engineering, correct?

EDDY: Yeah.

DAVID: Forgive me, I thought you were already here because of the level of competence that you have demonstrated and the amount of time that you spend, like, in the skills clinics class.

I've worked at a bunch of companies that tolerate the engineers doing a skills clinic, as long as it's, like, at lunchtime and not on the company dime, right? I've worked at a lot of companies that were like that. Acima is the first place I've ever worked at that said 10:00 o'clock every day, stop what you're doing, and go to skills clinic because that's the most effective thing we can do to get stuff done. It's not going to get the most done today, right?

And it's a 12.5% tax, right? I mean, it's one-eighth of your day, every single day that we're taking out of your work schedule. But we're banking on the fact that we can get 10 to the 100th power out of you a year from now. And it pays itself back in exponential dividends down the line, you know. Having somebody hang up the phones in QA for an hour, well, next year, we get that person as an engineer. And it's just the start because the year after that, we get that person as an intermediate engineer.

And five years from now, we get that person as a senior engineer. And all because we said, "Hey, why don't you sit down and let's learn how to write a web server, or let's learn how to use the SQL gem, or let's learn how to do, you know, this thing. Let's write a compiler for, you know, a couple of months." I just think that's amazing.

[crosstalk 14:58]

EDDY: I mentioned this, and I'm sorry if I put you on blast in front of millions of people that listen to this. But you were the very first person that taught me how to create a branch from GitHub.

DAVID: Oh, wow.

EDDY: And how to push it up. You legitimately spent, like, two hours walking through step by step on, like, how the architecture works using Git commands in order to get it up in the cloud. Like that, for me, I'm just like, oh my God, I have someone who's a senior developer in their own right, who's been in the industry for years, and he's spending an hour or two out of his day, you know, teaching me how to do a simple task, as simple as checking out a branch in GitHub.

Thanks to you, I had my very first branch created, and then, ultimately, it got merged. And I do want to say that that's paid its dividends because I've also helped other people interested in that as well.

DAVID: In defense of you, it did not take you two hours to learn how to create a branch, right? We dove in, and we explored this is how Git works. This is how Git thinks about your project. And once that light bulb went on, pulling down a branch, you're like, oh yeah, I can totally see. You had this mental model in your head of this is what GitHub is holding. This is what's on your hard drive. This is how Git's organizing. That's how Git is organizing this.

And creating a branch is how you just create a leaf on this tree. And then, you can move that branch up to here and the differences between merging and rebase. And I knew when I sat down with you that teaching you how to pull down a branch would be trivially easy once I explained how all of Git worked. [laughs] And I knew that showing you how all of Git worked was going to be the slowest way to teach you how to check out a branch, but, like you said, would pay dividends down the road. Because now we've got all the people around you know how Git works. And that's absolutely in your defense. Yeah, absolutely.

EDDY: Yeah. Yeah. No, I just wanted to make it known in case, you know, I've never expressed that. So, thank you for that.

DAVID: Thank you. I'll give you your 20 bucks after the podcast. Thank you.

EDDY: [laughs] While we were talking, I did look up an article online that gives you, like, a guideline of what topics make a job satisfactory. So, I was thinking maybe if we can go through that.

DAVID: Yeah.

EDDY: The first one is advancement, and I think we did touch on that. And I think I guess we can all just agree that a sense of advancement in a company gives you the motivation to continue. The second one, and I think it's just as important, is compensation. And I think that attributes a lot to people's, like, longevity for employment. Would you agree?

DAVID: How much time do we have? No, I don't. There's a whole slew of studies that have come out that basically show us that once you have enough compensation to pay your rent, buy your groceries, to live comfortably, and, you know, have just enough disposable income to not go crazy, compensation becomes one of the least important parts of your job. After you break out of the poverty line, compensation just becomes a score. And, yeah, it's fun bumping up that score. I got to be honest with you; I enjoy that. But it's so low on my feature list.

The correlation, however, or the other half of this, is that when compensation is not sufficient, it's the only motivator, right? You could have the best job in the world, with the best people, doing the most meaningful charitable work in the world, really improving the lives of humans around you. And if you can't make rent, you have to go flip burgers at McDonald's to make up that money. If you don't have enough money, it's the only motivator.

I will just throw this out for people that want to look at this; go Google Drive by Dan Pink. Google it or search for it on YouTube. There's, like, a half-hour version where he gives the full talk. And there's, like, a five-minute synopsis. There's a really good one (This is old, and it's going to date me.) where it's the YouTube channel where the guy draws on the whiteboard. And, like, he makes an animated sketch of the entire talk across the whiteboard. And if you find that one with Dan Pink's Drive, it's fantastic.

He gets into the other side of it, which is that they've shown that if they escalate your compensation in a job where you just have brain-dead physical labor if they increase your compensation, your output goes up slightly because you'll sweat harder, right? You'll knuckle down and like, ooh, I want that extra, you know, I want that extra bonus at the end of the day, and you'll sweat harder. But if your job is to think, the more money is on the line, the more stressed out you get, and the lower your performance becomes. And it's dramatic.

Like, if we say, "Hey, come solve this logic puzzle. If you can solve this logic puzzle in five minutes, and it's, like, one sentence or two sentences, so it's an easy solution, if you can solve this in five minutes, we'll give you $5." And a lot of people can solve it. And then they sat down, and I want to say they went to India, and they basically gave...I can't remember, but it was a lot of money. It was, like, two or three days' wages.

So, like, for us, it would be like somebody sitting down and saying, "If you can solve this logic puzzle in five minutes, I will give you $1,000." Now you're thinking about the $1,000 instead of thinking about the logic problem. And presto, you can't solve the logic problem because you actually need your full brain to do it. I will agree that if your compensation is insufficient, it's the only thing.

And I can also say I've worked at a company where I wanted a raise, and I felt like they promised me a raise and based on my performance. And, at the end of the time period, by every plausible metric, I had blown the doors. Like, my manager literally said, "You have blown the doors off of your performance review, drastically exceeds all expectations. Oh, but we recalculated the budget this year, and we can only give you a third of the raise that we promised you." And I was [inaudible 21:08] because I had busted my back because I wanted the raise, not because I wanted a pat on the back from this manager, but because I wanted the raise. And I didn't get the raise.

And over the next, I think, nine months, I kept pushing on my manager, like, "You really need to give me this raise. You really need to give me this raise." And he's like, "Well, we can't do it. We can't do it. We can't do it." And then I gave notice. I'm like, you know what? I'm going to go work...and I literally told him, "I don't have another job lined up. I'm just done working here."

Now, to be clear, I was really sick of my boss. I was really sick of his boss. And I was really sick of the president of the company. They were all very miserly. And they also had a lot of contempt for their employees. Like, it was apparent they were better than you; that's how they felt. And I turned in my notice, and my manager said, "I'll give you three times the raise we promised you." Just on the spot, like, I will give you a raise.

And, to be clear, we're talking about dimes and nickels here. The raise they promised me was 2,500 bucks per year, and they gave me a $1,000 raise. And he came back and said, "I'll give you a $9,000 raise effective immediately if you stay." And I lost it. I became absolutely livid. I'm like, "Rob, what you're telling me is that you've always had enough money to pay me what I wanted. And you just wouldn't give it to me. No. You have just doubled my reason to leave. I really just don't want to work here anymore." Then I walked out. So, yeah, compensation, eh.

MARK: It sounds like you experienced exactly what you were telling us at the beginning of this podcast, that you quit the manager and not the job.

DAVID: Yeah. I think we've beaten compensation to death. What's next on the list, Eddy?

EDDY: Yeah, the next one is engagement. So, what holds your attention? It keeps you invested while you're working. And some people attribute that to be just as important as everything else on the list that we've mentioned. And I think I've mentioned that too, right? Well, sort of. My job needs to continue to be interesting and challenging, or else I'll lose interest. Now, to be fair, personally, that's how it's always been since I started [laughs]. Like, I'm always being dealt with challenges, and it's great.

DAVID: Yeah, I learned a really great acronym, and I can't remember where I found it, and my Google-fu has failed me. So, anybody listening to this, if you find it, please contact us and let me know where you find it. But there's an acronym for things that engage us, and the acronym is NICU, like, natal intensive care unit. But, in this case, it stands for Novelty, Interest, Challenge, and Urgency. These are the four things that will get you out of bed running to your computer to get some work done, that will sharpen your focus, you know, to a razor's edge.

And we were talking about attention deficit disorder, which is something that colors my life excessively. I'll just say it that way. And so, I have to learn how to work with my strengths and not work with my weaknesses, or I get just destroyed. And people with ADD we are much more slave to NICU, to novelty, interest, challenge, and urgency. And so, if you don't have these things, you can disengage, right? And, yeah, if you don't feel like you're getting anything done, it can disengage you as well.

MARK: So, I think I can see that. During college, I was very disengaged with a lot of my classes just because of how I was taught. But then, like, outside the class, I'd be interested in basically the exact same thing, either by watching YouTube videos or doing [laughs] online challenges.

DAVID: Yeah, if this doesn't describe you, I'm certain everyone listening to this knows somebody who, the night before the end of the semester, the teacher basically, you know, grants a plea bargain to the student and says, "You're currently getting a D- in my class. You haven't turned in any homework. I will give you 70% credit for everything you turn in all the way back to the beginning of the semester if you turn it in before the deadline tomorrow." And then that person stays up all night.

I've been this person. I've been this person multiple times; I'm ashamed to say. Where it's like, oh, okay, yeah, I could not get engaged. I physically could not force myself to do the homework when it was assigned. But now that it's like, oh, I've got a D- and you're telling me I can raise this to a B+ by doing all of it overnight? That's urgent. That's a challenge. Now I'm interested, and now I'm engaged. And, yeah, you stay up all night just slaving away. And you have fun. You actually enjoy doing your homework, which is what the teacher wanted you to do from day one.

MARK: Question is, where's the line between you just not being engaged and when you're just being a procrastinator? [laughs]

DAVID: Well, for me, about 20 milligrams of Ritalin. [laughter] I'm kidding. I'm kidding. But Ritalin doesn't actually help. [laughter] It's a good question, right? If you've ever been in a meeting with me where we're talking about a subject or a topic, I will ask, like, really far-reaching questions about, like, who's using this, and what's important to them? And who's using their product, and what's important to them? And people are like, why does Dave care what's happening seven time zones away with people that are using this business that uses our product, you know, that we are writing?

And the answer is because once Dave can see where the software is going through the entire world and can see someone getting happy as a result of the lines of code that he writes, Dave gets really excited about the software. And he will stay up all night writing database splitters and grinding accounting code. And it's, like, programmers want to work on cool stuff, and that's, you know, we all talk about that.

But there's a dirty little secret of computer science, which is it's all cool stuff. The only thing that's uninteresting to me is when nobody cares when you write it and, meh, thanks, and one ticket moves. Or you don't even have a ticket, right? It's just like, oh, yeah, cool, meets the expectations. Ahhh, yeah, it's soul-draining to have that.

MARK: You've got me thinking now. I'm now remembering my high school math teacher who said all homework was optional. Paying attention in class was optional. You could be drawing in class or whatever. As long as you did well in the tests, in the final, he didn't care what you did.

And he made a habit of every 20 minutes in class; he would stop the class and say a random joke or go off topic completely just to make sure everyone was focused, engaged because he read somewhere that the average kid's attention span was 20 minutes. And, as you get older, that attention span starts to shrink. So, trying to listen to someone or teach someone something for longer than 20 minutes at a time, you need to give them a break. Otherwise, things start going in one ear and not the other.

DAVID: Yeah, totally. There was a professor at my university who did the most cunningly evil thing I've ever heard. He started class on day one, and he said, "I'm going to give the lecture, and I have inserted an error into the lecture. You get plus 10% to your grade...on any assignment you turn in, you get 10% extra credit if you can write the error down. If you can catch me making the mistake and write it down, and then correct the error, you get, like, this big jump on your grade."

And now, everyone is watching the whiteboard like a hawk, right? Just, okay, did he put all the, you know, pluses and minus? Okay, yeah, he did. The parenthesis are matching. Ah! There it is. He made a mistake right there. And you just, like, all the pens are like [vocalization]. You're like, oh, like, if you weren't paying attention, you're like, oh, sounds like he just made the mistake. I better check what's on the whiteboard, right? And now, even the people who weren't paying attention are paying attention. And it was awesome.

And the reason it was evil, I mean, it was genius to have done that to the entire class because he had so much more engagement as a result by putting in this challenge, this interesting challenge, like, interesting challenge, right? Also, novelty, right? Like, I've never had a teacher pull this kind of, you know, BS before.

The reason it was evil is the last week of class...this was calculus. And he ground into one of the really hardest theorems that we were going to try to understand. I want to say he was taking integrals of, like, trig functions. So you had to...we'd been thinking in differentials and changes all semester. And now we had to think differentials and changes in circles because we were working with trig functions, right? Things that go around and around.

And he went all the way through the whiteboard and through the class, and we couldn't spot the error. And so, we all had notes from everything he had written. So, we all went back. And we went through everything top to bottom, and we couldn't find the error. And, like, I went through my notes, like, three four times, and other people in the class, you know, multiple times. I went through my notes twice, let's be honest. I went through twice. I wasn't that dedicated.

But yeah, came to class to turn in homework, you know, the following two, three days, you know, the next day of lecture was, like, a Monday, Wednesday, Friday class. So, we come back in on Wednesday, and he says, "Yeah, so there was no error in yesterday's assignment. I just really wanted you guys all to study the crap out of differential on trig." [laughter] And it worked. And we all did it. And --

EDDY: That's --

DAVID: We laughed, right?

MARK: He played you guys.

DAVID: Yeah.

MARK: He played you guys. [laughs]

DAVID: And I got 100% on that part of the test, and I did really well on the rest of the test because of how he'd done.

EDDY: He found a way to engage you. And I think that's key, right?

DAVID: Yeah.

EDDY: I think there's a thin line between engagement because there have been times or situations, personally, and I think maybe some people can relate where, like, if you feel overwhelmed taking, like, a task, right? Like, your engagement slowly goes down, right? Because you see no purpose. And that's part of the reason to why, like, a teacher or a mentor is really important if done correctly because even if you hit those bumps, there's just methodologies on getting unstuck, right?

DAVID: Yeah.

EDDY: I actually wanted to say something that's kind of interesting, kind of, like, as a side topic to that. And I think I had a professor in college who had, like, three classes, and, like, his attendance for each class was, like, 15 students, a little over. And it was English, and, to myself, I was just like, there's no way this teacher reads all these essays. And, like, these essays we were turning in were, like, 15 pagers, front and back. And I'm just like; there's just no way he reads through everything, right?

And so, like, one of his assignments somewhere in the middle, I tried to be funny. And I was just like, if you read this sentence, I'll buy you a pizza. And I continued with my research, right? And a couple of days pass. He's handing them out. And he hands it to me, and he's like, "What do you know?" He's like, "You owe me a pizza." He continues. [laughs] And I was in awe, right? And I gave him his pizza if you're curious. But, in reality, I was just like, wow, wow, right?

DAVID: Yeah. And what's the message there? The message is, Eddy, you are important to me. And that's why I'm paying attention to what you're writing, right?

EDDY: Yeah.

DAVID: It's not that I paid attention. It's not that, oh, I'm a good teacher. Look at how clever I am. It's, you're important to me.

MARK: Now give me the damn pizza.

[laughter]

DAVID: Yeah. Now give me the pizza. Yeah, right? [laughter] And now, helping you be honorable and fulfill your commitments is important to me, too, so give me a pizza. [laughs]

We are getting close to the top of the hour. Do you want to just burn through the rest of the list?

EDDY: Sure. The other ones are flexibility, proficiency, security, teamwork, and value.

DAVID: Nice.

EDDY: Yeah. And I think all those are pretty strong [inaudible 33:41] in their own right. We can even enlarge that and make it its own topic, honestly.

DAVID: Yeah. If you go check out Dan Pink's Drive, he gives, like, four or five things. And there's a really strong matchup, like, the ability to get better at a hard thing; mastery is what he calls it. But that's, you know, challenge, and proficiency, and engagement, right? The ability to get better at something and to be recognized for getting better. Yeah, it's well worth the read.

It helped me understand...I had...the year prior to Drive coming out or two years prior, I had taken a job. I was already in the industry. But I was making pretty poor money. And I got a job making double. But, I mean, I was already, like, a salaried software engineer. Making double was big money for me. And I was working for a lawyer who was, in hindsight, a psychopath. Like, I genuinely believe the man was a psychopath. He liked making people suffer. And I quit that job after, like, three months.

I lasted a very, very short time at that company because this guy would come in, wind me up, and piss me off, and scare the hell out of me, and then giggle and walk off. And I'm like, no. No amount of money is worth this. And it literally...I went back to, you know, about half of my salary. And I was making money in the 30s. So, you know, the job working with this guy was in the 70s, which, 20 years ago, again, big, big money, especially for Utah, right? Where the, you know...

And my wife, I came home and told her I had quit my job, and she's like, "It's about time." I'm like, "What?" She's like, "You have hated this guy since, I mean, this guy has just made you miserable. And you have been miserable to be around as a result. So, yeah, it couldn't happen soon enough." And I'm like, wow, okay.

We are out of time. Thank you very much. This has been a lot of fun. And I hope to see you guys next week.