I wish my code was half as good as my expectations for how my code should be. My lattes are better than my code, so maybe I should make latte art instead of ascii art
What you describe here is mostly a failure of management, which is a problem across industries and disciplines of work.
Too much work and too little time with too many competing priorities have very little to do with how happy you are as a DEVELOPER and very much to do with how happy you are as an EMPLOYEE.
Furthermore, just from empiric evidence, there are plenty of developers who are very happy with development being just their job, and loathe the idea of programming on their free time, yet I've known them to be excellent developers nonetheless.
Personally, I do like to have a clearly delimited idea of what the expectations on a given task are, and when they are considered completed, but having that or not doesn't stifle my creativity. A lack of vision and direction from management simply makes me lose faith that my work is actually impacting our users in the right ways.
And one last point, even for an artist, work is work for the majority of working artists. When they work under commission, their creativity is generally not as much into play as their artistic style, and their customers creativity (or sometimes their lack thereof) still overrides the artist's. Very few artists get a chance to be purely creative for work and still get paid for that, and generally only while they are still striving for their first breakthrough. A musician might be able to make their own music based only on their own creativity, but that goes away the moment they sign up with a label. Same goes for illustrators. The few exceptions I can think of are artisans who can spend their time and craft working on creative projects until they find a few that clients really enjoy, then the majority of the artisan's time goes into reproducing the same products over and over.
As a closing note, I do agree with the sentiment that poor leadership will lead to poor happiness at work, but if you still enjoy coding, exercise your creativity in side/hobby projects. Nobody can tell you what or how to do what you love on your own free time.
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What you describe here is mostly a failure of management, which is a problem across industries and disciplines of work.
Too much work and too little time with too many competing priorities have very little to do with how happy you are as a DEVELOPER and very much to do with how happy you are as an EMPLOYEE.
Furthermore, just from empiric evidence, there are plenty of developers who are very happy with development being just their job, and loathe the idea of programming on their free time, yet I've known them to be excellent developers nonetheless.
Personally, I do like to have a clearly delimited idea of what the expectations on a given task are, and when they are considered completed, but having that or not doesn't stifle my creativity. A lack of vision and direction from management simply makes me lose faith that my work is actually impacting our users in the right ways.
And one last point, even for an artist, work is work for the majority of working artists. When they work under commission, their creativity is generally not as much into play as their artistic style, and their customers creativity (or sometimes their lack thereof) still overrides the artist's. Very few artists get a chance to be purely creative for work and still get paid for that, and generally only while they are still striving for their first breakthrough. A musician might be able to make their own music based only on their own creativity, but that goes away the moment they sign up with a label. Same goes for illustrators. The few exceptions I can think of are artisans who can spend their time and craft working on creative projects until they find a few that clients really enjoy, then the majority of the artisan's time goes into reproducing the same products over and over.
As a closing note, I do agree with the sentiment that poor leadership will lead to poor happiness at work, but if you still enjoy coding, exercise your creativity in side/hobby projects. Nobody can tell you what or how to do what you love on your own free time.