Engineering needs wandering
I'm a software engineer. It is so fun and challenging. It's like doing puzzles all day. An engineer breaks problems or goals down into manageable pieces and then creates a solution in a systematic fashion.I once told one of my coworkers that the same kind of creativity is used to write a novel as is to write code to create a feature. He disagreed. He explained that there aren't many right ways to program something. There is a definite solution. Programming is very linear.
I still don't know if I agree with him or not. Programming is very linear, but there certainly is more than one way (most of the time) to accomplish a goal. There may be better and worse ways to accomplish something, depending on the other constraints, but there's some sort of creativity involved to figure out the best.
So, if art looks something like this:
then engineering is something like this:
But the thing is, you can deliver a hundred features that are the done in the "best" way possible, but that doesn't mean anyone cares about them. And over time, unless there is some wandering about to find out what is meaningful to users, the engineering will be pointless.
And maybe engineering doesn't even factor into this at all. Maybe the creativity used to come up with the idea for the feature is the only creativity in the process. Maybe the engineering part isn't creative at all. Maybe it's just problem solving.
But when I hear problem solving it makes me think of the need for creativity to "find a creative solution." I seem to remember hearing that phrase a lot.
Well, what do you think? Is engineering creative? Does it stagnate and get stale without some wandering. Does the wandering need to come before the engineering step, in the feature creation step?
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