I just finished reading Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us. Highly recommended reading! Or if you want to see the gist of it right now, this clip is a good summary. But I'd still recommend reading the book, as it goes into a lot more depth than the clip.
The book is about how traditional carrot and stick motivators don't work on most types of modern knowledge work - with programming being one of the strongest examples. Essentially, the problem with "extrinsic" motivators such as targeted money bonuses is that they stop people focusing on the work. Instead, people just focus on gaming the results to get more of the reward, and the work often suffers. A simplified (and very absurd) example would be paying programmers by the number of change request items that they resolve: obviously they'll just game the system by submitting lots of finer-grained (possibly even contrived) items, that they'll know how to get through quickly. They'll inevitably lose sight of the big picture and not be very productive.
A lot of it comes back to what I wrote a while back about "salary slavery". Modern 21st century knowledge work is still to a large extent being managed like 19th century factory work. The trouble is, carrot and stick motivators are great for simple mechanical tasks, but they don't work - and in many cases even demotivate - for creative knowledge work. The trick is essentially to hire good people, give them great tools and purpose, and then get out of their way. As soon as you feel like you need to control them, you've failed. The three pillars of this philosophy are Autonomy, Mastery and Purpose.
Without going into a full analysis of this new motivation philosophy, I'll just focus now on how it relates to burnout: Essentially, people and organisations who go against it tend to not be very productive, and tend to burn out easily. Burnout itself wasn't discussed much in the book (though it was mentioned in a few places), but reading between the lines, it's obviously one of the possible consequences for individuals in the "demotivated situations".
People need to feel in control of their lives (Autonomy), feel that they're learning and getting better and better at something (Mastery) and work on something that has a higher meaning (Purpose). Working under a strict 19th century factory style hierarchy, doing relatively the same thing over and over and over, and working on some random boring business system - are the exact opposites of autonomy, mastery and purpose. However, this is exactly what most software - and most other modern "knowledge work" workplaces - are like.
With this book (and some discussions on forums along a similar vein recently) I'm starting to realise more and more that burnout isn't so much about the technical content of the work, but more about the motivational philosophy behind how the work is done. If there is autonomy, mastery and purpose, even jobs which seem relatively mind-numbing on paper can be made interesting. By contrast, a badly managed workplace can be hell even if the technology used is quite interesting. Or as I've read on a forum recently (paraphrased): "If you're working in some crappy outdated scripting language, but doing gene sequencing programming that's narrowing down a cure for pancreatic cancer, your work will have a lot more purpose than working with the latest technology on some boring bank software.". Truth. Purpose here makes all the difference.
