There are two kinds of managers, the way I look at things: managers who stifle creativity, and those who endorse it.
Looking
back through my life, I find that I have had huge problems with the
first kind, and I’ve had a great time with the second. It usually
seemed to rear it’s head during my math classes. It started in
elementary class, and continued to fight and struggle every year except
one- my senior year. I remember back in Freshman year, during geometry
we were doing math problems that took half a page to complete. “Aha,” I
noticed, “I can just use the pythagorean theorem and cut it down to
about three lines.” Of course, this didn’t fly with my teacher, who
held a strong affinity towards doing things the way the book did them.
Now, I’ll agree, there are arguments towards doing it by the book
(“teaches you how to do it that way” is the general response), but I’m
a huge proponent of if it works better another way, then do it. As I
argued then- I know how to do it, and I know how to do it faster,
better, and with less points of failure.
This all continued, and
came to a huge head during Trig, Junior year. A friend and I wrote
programs every day, instead of taking the notes, that did the homework
for us. We even accomodated to our teacher’s archaic views and
developed the programs so that they showed the work; she, of course,
hated it, but it worked quite well. Then, finally, my senior year I had
Calculus AP; the first math that really challenged me, but at the same
time, the first math class I enjoyed for 5 years. It was only myself
and one other person in the class- we had started with 11, and the
other 9 dropped out- along with our teacher.
The reason I liked
the class so much was because she didn’t require work, and she didn’t
require that you simplify answers, and she didn’t care about the final
format, as long as it was right. It helped to show your work, so that
you could find errors, but you didn’t have to. You had the freedom to
do the work however you wanted to, you could find shortcuts and ways
around that worked better and made sense.
I find myself
harboring the same feelings in the workplace. I was an intern at a
company for about 8 months, where the projects came three-a-day, and it
was 85% copy and paste from other code. The other 15% was debugging. It
was all classic ASP (which suprised me more and more as time went by..
it was 2007, after all), and it was badly written. Something needed to
be done; however, there was no room for innovation, no room for, say, a
nice .net framework, not anything except heads-down coding. I was,
effectively, a code monkey.
My current place, however, is an
exception. In the same way as I found myself in a wonderful place after
moving from Trig to Calc, I find myself with creative freedom; if I
have an idea that will speed up processes, or that will help out in
some other way, and I’ve got down time- I can work on something.
Recently, I made a program that took some basic copy-paste work we did
from 20 minutes down to about 2- something I was a bit apprehensive to
show off, but, finally did to great reception. It gave me new hope that
there was somewhere that I could fit in and try new things out. We
later attempted integrating a wiki, which also worked wonders; the
whole team could now communicate and store data, instead of throwing
word docs around in VSS.
Now, I’m not advocating running off and
doing projects whenever you feel like it, and wasting company time to
try some thought out. However, I am advocating that if there’s a
genuinely good idea, and you’re not hammered down with work- creative
freedom is the best kind. It helps thoughts flow, and it sometimes pans
out to be a great development that can help out, and even occasionally
revolutionize the whole development team.
