[mac1175]

The Safety layer of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs is more important to me (age 37 and married with kids). As much as I would love to use my skills to contribute to humanity as a whole, the basic needs of someone in a similar phase of life must take care of the Safety layer first. However, I have found other ways to contribute to a cause (e.g., active in the community, charities, etc.)

[MBCook]

I want to work on something I care about. It doesn't have to make the world a better place in general, it can be "I want to make this system faster at processing 'X'" or "I want to make things easier for the customer". Just something I can believe in or strive towards. In the grand scheme of things it can be really insignificant.

However if at least twice a month I'm asked to change the way the calendar on a page looks, I'm going to get tired of it real fast. It becomes clear that it's just wasted effort and a lack of planning. When it seems like all your effort is being ignored, unnecessary, or thrown away it just kills motivation.

The system I spend most of my time on right now is mostly, if you boil it down, some simple record keeping for insurance customers. It's usually not very sexy. But while working on it there have been scaling challenges, using external services like S3 or Zencoder to give users new functionality, and other complexities. There is usually something I want to sink my teeth into, and that's something that keeps me working on it. If it was an ultra-simple CRUD app that never had any additional features, I don't know how long I would want to work on it.