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Comment by dasil003 | Hacker News Reader

Programmers are creative people.

The best programmers are creative in their work, but that's different than being a creative professional. The programming equivalent of a creative (not the verb but a noun) is the person who comes up with the next big thing, or at least tries to do this. Woz, Bill Gates, Zuck, etc. all fall into this category -- but the person slinging .net code to keep an insurance database isn't in the same category. And those in that later group are engineers, and there's nothing wrong with being an engineer -- but that's different than being an architect or a product designer if you know what I mean.

No, I don't know what you mean. Woz, Gates, and Zuck made names for themselves with good execution on the right idea at the right time.

While admirable, that's not exactly the definition of "creativity" in my books, especially not in the programming sense.

In fact, I would speculate that somewhere out there, there are .net DBA code monkeys doing more creative things to keep an aging insurance database infrastructure from collapsing than Zuckerberg did for facebook.

how about this... if a product manager hands you a spec with mockups and youre expected to return pixel perfect code in return, you're on the engineer end of the scale.

the key difference is freedom/autonomy.

I rather think that it has nothing to do with either. Comp engineers may be creative, but they're not in a creative field. They're in a field of artisanry, where they produce specialized, more or less hand made goods. Some of those people become famous for doing incredibly detailed work, but many just build chairs. Just because you come up with a creative solution does not make what you're doing art.

Creativity is not art.

Yes, but most working musicians aren't Mick Jagger or $famousmuso either. Many of them don't necessarily write music - just perform it.

Maybe the insurance database programmer is the coder equivalent of a session musician?

That was my point exactly.

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