Re:All the best engineering advice I stole from non-technica...
by mojuba on Monday August 05, 2019 @06:51AM
(#20612978)
It's up to you to choose a more creative engineering job that almost requires you to be a painter (or a screenwriter). Sometimes it's the jobs that are product-level slash engineering, sometimes it's purely engineering ones that require a lot of innovation. If you are a creative type and if you want to make your life more interesting, you will be attracted to these jobs.
If change the flattering comparisons then why not? Instead of someone writing a script for a movie, imagine it is someone writing sales copy. Instead of a "painter" presumably working on some masterpiece, imagine instead it is someone in one of those Chinese factories churning out still life 3265.
Most programming tasks are well understood - most programmers in big corporations are working on CRUD apps. The correct comparison is not to some highly creative process but to some semi-creative process. Sure the details might be different but in the main it can be well understood how long it takes to add crud screen 26.
I guess pg himself popularised the flattering "programmers are just like painters" nonsense: https://idlewords.com/2005/04/dabblers_and_blowhards.htm