"...achieve inhuman-seeming goals fueled by caffeine and pure joy for their work..."
Exactly!
There's almost nothing that can motivate me when I'm "done for the day". Not deadlines, budgets, help, dinner, not even money.
OTOH, there's almost nothing that can get me to knock off for the day when I'm "in the zone". Just yesterday, someone spent 5 minutes showing me something that turned out to be the missing link in 3 different places in my app. Six hours later, I looked up and realized that everyone was gone and the lights were out. Six of the most fun hours in a long time. You can't engineer that into your workplace.
Exactly!
There's almost nothing that can motivate me when I'm "done for the day". Not deadlines, budgets, help, dinner, not even money.
OTOH, there's almost nothing that can get me to knock off for the day when I'm "in the zone". Just yesterday, someone spent 5 minutes showing me something that turned out to be the missing link in 3 different places in my app. Six hours later, I looked up and realized that everyone was gone and the lights were out. Six of the most fun hours in a long time. You can't engineer that into your workplace.