Yes, innovation and creativity but also no interrupts. Example from this week. A customer asks me to really understand how JWT and AWS refresh tokens work (maybe we have to implement something similar for how service not running on AWS) and after a few hours there is a rush of emergency features to implement. I understand that it is inevitable but week after week of that it could demotivate people: there is a feeling that many hours of work are wasted and will never contribute to something deployed in production.
100%. In fact, let's be less scientific and more creative: 200%! My current job's entire lack of creativity is what's burned me out, made me unproductive (when for 3.5 years I was one of the most productive members of my team), and gotten me to the edge of the Quit Before You're Fired ultimatum. To put it into perspective, I've been coding to the letter of client functional requirements and hundreds of slides of detailed mock-ups so much that the two most creative things I've done at work in the past 4 years have been adding a nav menu filter (i.e. a textbox that runs Array#filter onChange) and converting a render loop of checkboxes into a render loop of multi-select options. Legitimately, a select box and an array filter are the most creative things I've been able to do at my job in four years. It's miserable.