Hacker News Reader

Comment by wereHamster | Hacker News Reader

In pure software engineering there is much less creativity needed than most people want to admit.

While the UI/UX people gather requirements and work with the client to work out how the app should look and behave, sure, they can use their imagination. But once the requirements are set then in many cases a software engineer can sit down and build the software. There is no creativity needed to decide whether to use a vector or a double linked list if you need to prioritise fast append and prepend. After all, if you break down software to its basic building blocks, it's all mathematics and logic. And there is no creativity in Mathematics.

View on HN

I think you confuse creativity (to create something new) with self-actualization and visual art. Programming is a craft, often used to create things which are really boring.

Coders often like their craft, they like creating things, even if the final product is not important to them on a personal level.

The result of the work is not boring (hopefully, for the sake of its users). But the process of getting there is rarely creative (in the sense of inventing something new).

Most software engineers rarely need to come up with new data structures or fancy algorithms. Most of these things are already there, we just need to know which ones to pick in a particular situation and how to glue them together.

It's perfectly fine to produce boring products. Data entry has never been fun, but it's needed.

Creating new algorithms or data structures may be scientifically creative. I don't know, maybe it's boring for the scientists and they think reasoning and writing about these is much more fun and creative than implementing them. Anyways it just one kind of creativity.

But there is creativity in 'just gluing' stuff together. It's not that simple and there is more choice involved than you suggest.

> And there is no creativity in Mathematics.

What?!

This isn't really true.

If a requirement is 'creative' - that is, it involves doing something that has never been done before, as opposed to a standard design pattern - then it will also require a creative implementation. Sometimes very simple requirements require great creativity in the implementation.

Most software requirements leave the question of how the thing will be achieved entirely unstated. It's very easy to write a single page of requirements that could require hundreds of pages of code to implement.

I know. I am so fucking angry no one told me this. I am a creative person I become very depressed without creative control. I had no idea programming was going to be this way and now I am stuck in a life of boring drudgery, wasting my life doing the thinking of some incompetent higher up the food chain. But there is no way out - I have to feed myself and my family. FML

Reply on news.ycombinator.com