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I’ve watched developers on multiple occasions stay up until sunrise to solve a technical problem without being asked and without extra pay. The best developers are addicted to problem solving. Just drop a Sudoku in the middle of a group and watch them attack it.
Faced with the right type of challenge many developers will not stop until it’s fixed, especially if it requires a particularly creative solution. Faced with the wrong type of challenge and they’re back on instant messenger describing the toast.
The right type of challenge is a technical challenge that teaches a new skill, preferably one everyone’s talking about. One example could be: “Consume these five RSS feeds, aggregate the data, and display the headlines on a web page…and figure out how to use AJAX to make it cool.”
The wrong types of challenges are things like: “Fix that other guy’s code. You know, the one we didn’t fire because we were afraid he might cause problems. Well, he wrote a really crappy system and now we need to fix it and make it high-quality and maintainable. Oh, and you have until tomorrow.”
”— http://www.softwarebyrob.com/2006/10/31/nine-things-developers-want-more-than-money/
