Prestige is an ok motivator, but curiosity is a better one. Curiosity never lies. - Paul Graham

Intellectual curiosity was not one of the motives on the FBI’s list. Indeed, the whole concept seemed foreign to them.
Those in authority tend to be annoyed by hackers’ general attitude of disobedience. But that disobedience is a byproduct of the qualities that make them good programmers.

If you can keep hope and worry balanced, they will drive a project forward the same way your two legs drive a bicycle forward.

The third worry of the pointy-haired boss, the difficulty of hiring programmers, I think is a red herring. How many hackers do you need to hire, after all? Surely by now we all know that software is best developed by teams of less than ten people. And you shouldn’t have trouble hiring hackers on that scale for any language anyone has ever heard of. If you can’t find ten Lisp hackers, then your company is probably based in the wrong city for developing software. In fact, choosing a more powerful language probably decreases the size of the team you need, because (a) if you use a more powerful language, you probably won’t need as many hackers, and (b) hackers who work in more advanced languages are likely to be smarter.