Is it still creative if you get paid?

I often wish I were more artistic in nature.  At least, I wish I were more able to aptly express myself visually.  I have great difficulty taking something in my head and drawing it out on paper, and find myself envious of the doodles and throwaway sketches many of my friends produce while bored in lecture halls.  Even my handwriting leaves much to be desired.  While quite passable, it is nowhere near the pleasing aesthetic my father and sister are able to produce (the two of them being quite good at calligraphy).

To cope, I've tried to find other outlets for my creativity.  It's likely why I gravitate toward language, music, songwriting (a combination of the previous two), and software rather than art and crafting.  On the other hand, it may be that I gravitate toward these subjects because I perceive logic, structure, and correctness more easily than abstract concepts.  While this applies most directly to my affinity for engineering, it also can be argued that music and language have a defined structure or grammar, as the notes in a chord are either right or wrong, and languages follow syntax trees (with many exceptions, of course).  Even poetry can have as loose or rigid of a structure as one would like, and the flexibility provides opportunities for myriad avenues of exploration.

However, most of my day to day "creative expression" is controlled by my full-time job.  To pay the bills, I (as I'm sure most of you as well) work at least forty hours a week, leaving little free time (with a rested mind) for creativity outside of work.  However, one of the more attractive aspects of being a software engineer in consumer electronics is that I have a fair amount of control and input as to the look and feel of the end product, as well as the code architecture (at least, for parts of the software that I design).  Of course, the amount of creativity I am allowed to apply to a project will be determined by the needs of the company (and hopefully by the needs of our customers).  There are really two distinct facets to creative expression in a consumer electronics software engineering role.

The first is external, which includes anything the user sees, experiences, or interacts with in the software.  This can be broken down further  into many subcategories.  For instance, there is the language used when presenting information to the user, which must be explicit, clear, and concise as it will be translated into many other languages for international markets and a)translations cost money and b)ambiguous, overly wordy sentences will confuse users.  Another external aspect is the look.  This is huge topic, which encompasses the font sets, sizes, and colors used, graphics styles, color schemes, and so on.  Additionally, there is the feel of the unit.  This encompasses menu flow, feature placement, how information is presented to the user, and all of the other minute aspects that give a product a comprehensive feel to enforce the idea of a brand identity.

That being said, working on large scale projects for a large company means there will be quite a bit of collaboration.  With so many cooks in the kitchen, I often find that I do not have as much freedom as originally thought when beginning a new feature.  For instance, user experience surveys may help dictate how a feature must be designed, and a graphics team might want my images to be in line with a cohesive vision of the entire project (maintaining the look and feel).  All of these take away from my ability to go from soup to nuts on an entire feature and have it be fully my own.  This is not because the company is evil and trying to sap all creative expression out of my job, but rather because we want the product to have a cohesive feel and we want the interface to be intuitive, so certain bodies have influence over the engineers to enforce these ideals (whether or not the goals are achieved is a debate for another time).

 Even when a feature design flow or the images to be used is decided upon by someone else, if I am tasked with implementing the feature then I can architect the code itself to my liking.  This is the second facet, or internal creative expression.  Just as there are ways to write a "good" paper and a "bad" paper, there are absolutely ways to write "good" code and "bad" code.  Granted, the end user does not care how a feature works; only that it works "well."  Of course, the term well has many qualifiers such as robustness, speed, reliability which can be determined (or at least influenced) by how the software is written internally.  While there may be limitless ways to end up with code that will "do something" you want it to, the fun and creativity comes in with making sure the code has high quality.

One aspect of quality could be that the code is readable.  Again, this does not matter for the end user, but for those who have to maintain and add on to it, this is very important.  It should also be robust.  By this I mean it will not crash when something "bad" happens (of course, bad can mean a hundred different things, from erroneous user input to loss of internet connectivity, etc etc depending on the application).  Speed is always important, especially these days as consumer technology races to compete in a truly global market.  There is a definite satisfaction in engineering when something that used to take 5 seconds is reduced to 0.5 seconds.

All of these areas provide opportunities for creative expression, whether it is an internal incremental improvement or an entirely new feature that the public will see and experience.  It may not always feel as satisfying as something you created solely on your own, but even within a large company one can find opportunities to express themselves and leave their mark.

I would have written this all in a nice letter, but my handwriting is terrible.