[montanalow]

Most managers and organizations miss the fact that engineers are often motivated by solving puzzles in ways like this, because it's fun. If you want to accomplish big challenges, quickly, make it fun for the engineer. Working long hours on projects like this doesn't burn engineers out, it sharpens their skills, broadens their knowledge and grows the organizations capabilities long term.

This sort of cultural difference of exploration and letting work be fun is one of the big things that accounts for the differences in velocity between big co's and little co's. Does your work give you energy to the point where not only you love doing it, you want to tell everyone else about it?

[deepsun]

This. And also "shiny new thing" vs. "don't touch if it works" -- oftentimes it's fun to rewrite some part of a project even if it works ok. As a manager, I just need to limit the blast scope, and make sure the refactoring reaches its end, not leave it half-baked.