In their job application form, a company asked me "What's your motivation?". In reply, I pulled together the following mini-screed.
It's only a fragment of why I'm involved in technology, but I liked it enough to post it here. (Besides, their form has a bug which stopped me from being able to submit it, and I wanted to put this somewhere. Curse of the tester, I guess.)
As terrible as it sounds, I think that much of my motivation comes from frustration.
It's galling when I see a UI that's actively unhelpful. Encountering yet another easily preventable security problem makes me shake my head. Code that's a nightmare to test or debug makes us all want to scream. It's so frustrating, because I've seen all of these things done right, yet so frequently they're done wrong! So much so that most people have gotten used to them and think of them as ordinary.
I like code that's clear. Design that conforms to the user instead of forcing the user to conform to it. Features that are solid and robust. Applications that people rave about...or that just let them get their work done so unobtrusively that they're hardly noticed at all.
Things like that make me proud. That's the kind of project I want to contribute to.