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Comment by greenyoda | Hacker News Reader

I think we may be overestimating how much of the average developer's job actually requires creativity.

Most programming jobs combine creativity with more mundane work. For example, tracking down bugs or answering e-mail questions from co-workers or customers generally doesn't require the amount of creativity that solving a previously unsolved problem does. Neither does figuring out how some open source API works (whoever designed it originally did the heavy lifting for us).

So if we reserve the hard stuff for our hours of peak creativity, we could optimize our creative output while still getting a lot of other useful stuff done in the remaining hours of an eight hour day. Even if my brain is completely fried, I can usually find something to do that pushes my work forward.

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I think you may be overestimating what a "creative job" actually entails.

My girlfriend is an artist (teaches fine art 50% of the time, does commissioned work 50% of the time). I think a lot of people would agree that this falls within "creative work". And yet she also does a lot of tedious things, like applying several layers of varnish to a finished piece, repeating a certain pattern hundreds of times (eg. feathers on a bird), etc (and this doesn't include stuff like generating invoices with clients, scheduling times to talk with them, etc.).

What's the ultimate "creative job" to you?

I think that a developer's job (unless you're in something ~extremely~ repetitive) is highly creative- just that highly creative jobs still have a lot of tediousness. I was in research for a while, which I'd consider "creative", but I spent a lot of my time doing things like reviewing paper drafts for typos, figuring out why some code wouldn't compile, etc.

Even in the most creative job ever, 90% of your work will likely be "daily grind".

> What's the ultimate "creative job" to you?

I'd hazard "Creative Director." You know, the role the creator of a character or story setting (e.g. Stan Lee) gets put in when they consult on a movie tie-in. Basically involves talking to people and writing down what you talked about to make sure everyone has your vision in their head. ("Game Designer" is also a pretty isomorphic job, given the games industry.)

Then you're spending 90% of your time communicating. I'm sure Stan Lee spends far more time communicating his ideas to other people than he does developing them.

"Tracking down bugs" is a previously unsolved problem. It may not be difficult, but it also may require as much creativity as writing something new.

+1 this. And the same for answering customer support issues. There's no limit to how creative customers can be at breaking everything they touch. Prey tell the focus you need to even begin to imagine what is wrong when they vaguely describe some convoluted behavior.

+1 as well.

I'd say it can be just as difficult to track down and fix a bug than solve a novel problem. In fact, in many cases it can be harder and require more creativity in how to go about discovering the bug, if we assume that the bug fixer didn't write the code nor design the original solution.

I agree that some bugs require a great deal of creativity to track down (maybe even writing a new debugging tool), but in my experience, most bugs are caused by a minor oversight and can be found by straightforward techniques like examining logs, or examining program state in the debugger where a segfault occurs, or running a few experiments to do a "differential diagnosis" (it happens when I do A and B, but not when I do C, so the bug must be here). These are things that I can still do when I don't have the mental energy to synthesize new code designs.

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