General discussion
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Topic
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Is there a place in IT for the uncreative?
LockedI supposed there might be, but it would have to be a pretty tiny niche.
Bits of brilliant code labeled “Magic begins here”, “ADVNTR” games and later via the academically-stilted PLAyTOy to video-games, getting a primitive piece of garbage from Ill-Begotten Monstrosities to “sing” “Daisy, Daisy…”, making line and chain printers make music by controlling the rhythm of garbage printed on the paper or by controlling their generation of RF noise and playing it back using a cheap radio, Snoopy posters and calendars, contour graphs with tonal density gradations using over-printed alpha-numeric characters, Al Capp strutting across the monitor of a super-computer or Snoopy swooping across on his dog-house, even “PERFORM UNNATURAL_ACTS”, elegant algorithms, doing an academic assignment by having the required beastial programming language generate the required machine code and then executing it, finding bugs, calling the module to make it easy to update electronic documation “UpDoc” just to get people to ask “What’s Up Doc?”, imagining what the heck the user is seeing and doing while talking over the phone, test coverage without being exhaustive, reducing massive amounts of wind-tunnel data or sub-atomic particle collision data so something that can be understood in glance, creating a data-base of the organization’s LAN or VPN node graph in order to automate statistically appropriate variations in ping rate for rapid detection of network faults while minimizing such extraneous traffic, integrating the QA test-base with the version/configuration/source code library to minimize variations in the developers’ and QA testers’ environment, removing the cruft and only the cruft from a tangled mess of a data-warehouse… all require significant amounts of creativity.
Lack of creativity would be a major handicap in most IT work.