How to find engineering motivation

As an employee, we firstly want to be deserved to what we do and keep growing. But the core momentum of development at any scope, is innovation.

Sometimes, we feel lost or goalless because we don't have enough challenges, specifically when our internal teams don't have interesting ideas to implement. So, we need some framework to develop new ideas.

Normally, if this boring period is considered as temporary, we just fill our time with some technical debts tasking to reduce our worries on unexpected incidents. We can also consider it a relaxing time for us to do some research/sharing jobs.

However, there are also more severe situations when actually the business team are seeking new ideas, and engineering team are hungry. What should we do ? I suggest we take deeper look at our privilege as technology engineers which can solve existing problems of a lot of people by software. I found a great article sharing a very inspiring framework to benchmark such potential problems:

This article gives us a good indicator: let find problems help many people a lot. "Helping people" is not just bringing more income to them, helping people can making their lives safer, their awareness and behaviors more ethical, their business more sustainable & smooth & effective... And "many people" would be some lower labor classes such as freelancer, micro business, drivers, ... who are low-paid and not well cared in the economy, as they are less get attention than others. That's why Dzung Dang starting Nano Technology to help industry parks' employees borrowing money when they need, and why AhaMove is more shining in Covid pandemic.

With such point of view, we can start observing the world in a more active way: talking more to our users, see outstanding social problems and check if they fit our business and expertise, or help others companies doing their mission solving these problems.