how about this... if a product manager hands you a spec with mockups and youre expected to return pixel perfect code in return, you're on the engineer end of the scale.
the key difference is freedom/autonomy.
I rather think that it has nothing to do with either. Comp engineers may be creative, but they're not in a creative field. They're in a field of artisanry, where they produce specialized, more or less hand made goods. Some of those people become famous for doing incredibly detailed work, but many just build chairs. Just because you come up with a creative solution does not make what you're doing art.
Creativity is not art.
While admirable, that's not exactly the definition of "creativity" in my books, especially not in the programming sense.
In fact, I would speculate that somewhere out there, there are .net DBA code monkeys doing more creative things to keep an aging insurance database infrastructure from collapsing than Zuckerberg did for facebook.