I put usefullness, improvement, wealth, help to my neighbor as main motivations for work. (This *can* match with the goal of a company or corporation) And I consider fun, creativity, friendship, knowledge as the main requirements for doing the best job. On the contrary, many people consider work just "work", meaning something that is inherently bad, but must be done somehow. In these assumptions, usefullness, improvement, wealth, help to neighbors, fun, creativity, friendship, knowledge are not directly related to work. Maybe they can exist inside work, but they are not required to. The consequences are obvious: people accept to work in bad conditions because they think it's normal. The phrase "It's work. It sucks." is common, but it's not depicting an absolute fact; it depicts the most common situation in which we work today, but that doesn't free it from depicting a real perversion.

I sadly noticed that almost many people don't get this simple reasoning. As a consequence, they put "a good salary" as the main incentive and the most important thing for continuing to do the same job, even if the job is stressful, repetitive, and unrewarded from a human point of view (like when noone is telling you "you did a good job!", "I like the way you did this!", "I love your string hack!" and similar phrases). Somebody even told me that he would sign a life long contract with the company he's working for, for a double paycheck, a car, a laptop, and a cell phone provided by the same company.

To me, that's a very empty statement, especially if it comes from an engineer, or a programmer. As a programmer, I naturally like to create new things, to do something one couldn't do before; if I don't consider that, there's not very much left, beside writing words in a weird syntax. My actions as a programmer can have a meaning if they are employed to make something that increases the total wealth of society, hopefully a large part of it, without harming other people. In this way, passion can greatly improve the way people work, reducing stress and anger by sharing a common goal in which everyone believes. Neither ot these things is determined by money. The main consequences are

• better software, thoroughly tested;
• the building of a community of people who are happy to work hard together for a common goal, sharing their knowledge.

This is not utopistic: it's already been done in every open source project, where people decide to collaborate because they believe in a specific project. And it's done by Free Software projects, where freedom is the most important thing.

[...] to be completed [...]