[pipo234]

Having mentored a dozen of developers over the years, I've arrived at a strong bias toward hiring intrinsically motivated individuals. It's much easier to grow skills given someone is motivated than vice versa. KPIs (or "SMART" objectives) are mostly managerial toys that seldom improve work ethos.

Happiness in the workplace is more often than not related to other aspects than the primary process of developing software. If the subject matter itself (as in: "I earn a living while hating the building websites in PHP") is the root cause of unhappiness, no recovery plan, KPI or reward can fix this. Best find another job.

[fogx]

SMART goals and KPIs are meant to improve work focus, not work ethos. Those two are not in opposition to each other. IME engineers who don't want to do measurably good work are inexperienced, disgruntled or unmotivated.

Forcing goals onto a disgruntled/unmotivated engineer will end badly. Giving no goals to motivated engineers will also end badly. Giving bad, unrelated or unachievable goals to motivated engineers will end in disgruntled or unmotivated engineers.

You have to get both right.