As an engineer, it's not your job to be creative. The only creativity that happens in the company is that of C-suite people (who first comes up with what you'll build) and that of the sales staff (who figure out how to turn those half-baked ideas of the C-suite folks into something that can be sold).
Over the past months I've been having this crushing realization that - at scale - you can be either a creative manager or an assembly-line developer. You can't be a creative development. There are few R&D jobs here and there where the people with technical skills get to be creative, but they're scarce.
But do you really want to be the developer who has to debug 'creative' code after the original dev has left? It may not be as much fun, but I don't think that assembly-line development is entirely a bad thing. Even something minor like style conventions: far better to fit into the assembly line of your team's style guide than produce a project where every file is written in a slightly different way. Is this particular variable supposed to be const b/c it is all caps, or not? The last class followed that standard, but who knows? Small example, but can be applied to larger things as well. Last month I had to 'maintain' an application for a small business that had seen too much creativity from contractors over the years, and it seemed like every single one chose a different language.
Or we can just abandon practice of referring to development as engineering, and treat every project like artisinal craft work.
As an engineer, it's not your job to be creative. The only creativity that happens in the company is that of C-suite people (who first comes up with what you'll build) and that of the sales staff (who figure out how to turn those half-baked ideas of the C-suite folks into something that can be sold).
Over the past months I've been having this crushing realization that - at scale - you can be either a creative manager or an assembly-line developer. You can't be a creative development. There are few R&D jobs here and there where the people with technical skills get to be creative, but they're scarce.