Look, people are motivated by different things. Some people are motivated by unanswered questions. Some people are motivated by doing a good job. Some people are motivated by the impact they have on others' lives.

Any of these people can solve problems in programming, and they often all do. It's naive to assume your entire team is motivated by the same thing as you. Furthermore, if you're building a team, you want diversity of motivation because it leads to diversity of viewpoints. Programmers who are motivated by people drive us to make usable software and not just to "solve the problem." Programmers who are motivated by quality challenge us to improve test coverage and keep our documentation clean.

If you look at the composition of a diverse engineering team, you might notice that many of them are motivated to solve problems for different reasons.

Programming isn't done in a vacuum, and our job isn't just to crap out solutions to hard problems. We don't work in a vacuum. Our solutions have to be robust, and they have to actually help people. Having a diversity of viewpoints on your team can help you ensure those boxes are checked.