Motivation is crucial in influencing the performance and productivity of individuals and thus plays an important role in building competitive advantage of an organization. Recently studies on motivation in the software engineering field have been of interest to researchers. The rationale behind such interest is attributed to the fact that software engineering is a distinct profession thus strategies to motivate them may be different from other professions and are therefore crucial to be understood. Motivation is argued as situational and is very much dependent on personal characteristics. This paper discusses motivation in the field of software engineering and examines the characteristics of Malaysia software engineers. Questionnaire was used as data collection method and 80 respondents participated in the study. The results revealed some salient characteristics of Malaysian software engineers. © 2011 IEEE.