Homework Assignment #2
Matthew Brown
CWID: 10271660
Introduction
The focus of this study is work place motivation for software engineers and how it compares to engineers not in the computer software discipline. Determining the degree to which social aspects of a work place motivate software engineers can give insight to employers attempting to recruit software developers for employment. Motivation is simply described as a reason or reasons for a particular action or behavior. The goal is to determine that social motivational factors are more important to software engineers than other engineers as well as any other type of motivational factor in the work place.
Previous Work
A previous literature review about motivational factors left me wondering if software engineers were more interested in social motivations than a typical engineer. The result of one study, Designing Motivation Strategies for Software Engineering Teams: an Empirical Study, showed that a the highest rated motivational factor was “work with people” [1]. An initial investigation of software practitioners’ motivation found that “people” was the most frequent answer for motivation a majority of the time [2]. I found this intriguing since the societal assumption is that engineers are anti-social individuals.
Study Design
For this study, a survey is the best design to get the appropriate data. Since the independent variable “field of engineering” is uncontrolled, the type of study is non-experimental. This survey will consist of a series of motivational factors of which the respondent will evaluate its importance to his or her self. Each factor will be categorized as either a social, an environmental, or a compensation motivational factor. The data will be analyzed to confirm the following hypotheses:
H1) Software Engineers value social motivators more importantly than environmental or compensation motivators.
H2) Software Engineers value social motivators more importantly than engineers from…