Something that I’ve begun to notice more and more is that coders are no longer being allowed or encouraged to be creative. Instead they are being treated more like trained monkeys who are given details of what they should be producing and told to go away and do it. Apparently coders are no longer qualified to care about things like user experience, usability, design because there are others out there to whom those things are their primary mission in life, and implementation is of no concern to them.

I realise that innovating without worrying about the constraints of reality is very often a good thing. But can’t help but feel that attitudes are marginalising those who could also make a creative contribution. Pride (in a positive sense) in work is a great motivator, is it possible to feel pride when assembling something that you were allowed no input to? How is this different from, for example, stacking shelves in a supermarket? Some people are happy to sit there and churn out code, solving technical issues. Some people are happy doing repetative tasks all days. But I suspect the majority of people would like more involvement than that.

I believe the future is cross discipline collaboration, otherwise software engineering will no longer be the career of choice for many people.