Oh, definitely agreed! This is how I feel about it too.

In my interpretation, yeah, programs are internally motivated to perform their functions, as strongly as humans are motivated by love or money or anything.

They feel about their jobs the way humans fantasize about feeling about their jobs. We imagine a really good job being a “calling,” or a “vocation” – a voice that calls us. This is almost the literal reality for a program like Tron, who in the first movie is shown to feel his User calling him to do a task– and then becomes absolutely, unswayably hyperfixated on it until the task is complete.

They have the sort of passion for their jobs we can only barely dream of. What this feels like, is anyone’s guess. For some programs I suppose it could feel like the urge any artist would recognize from being hyperfocused on a creative project.

For others it could be a more physical sort of urge and pleasure. I’ve often portrayed it in my fiction as being basically the programs’ version of a sex drive– the physical function that fills the role that reproduction fills in biological life, with urges and pleasures forming around it in a similar way.

I feel there’s enough sexual subtext in Tron’s I/O Tower experience to support my headcanon that that’s how it feels for him, anyway.

As for other programs, I’m sure there are a great variety of experiences. But in any case I don’t think programs would need any equivalent of money at all, unless they were being manipulated into doing jobs they weren’t designed for.

(Which would be a sad, unfulfilling life for them, even with money, because what could money do to replace the life that gave them meaning?)

Anyway, when I watched Uprising, the jobs of the mechanics really struck me in a disturbing way. At one point Beck is afraid he’s going to get fired from his job. And what would that mean, for a program? You are your job. I can’t imagine it being much different from a death sentence.