The very best engineers are like artists, in that they harness their creativity to solve problems efficiently and effectively, often in innovative and personal ways.
And artists who are respected in the field of software can use consistent methods to produce solid maintainable code. I wouldn't say "zero surprises" though, I'm often surprised by reading the code of an artist, how they achieve extraordinary results with mundane code that a child can understand.
The example that comes to mind is Fabrice Bellard. He's one of the most talented engineers - and I'm sure many of us would agree that his software is a work of art.
Well, as someone who has to manage a team, I completely agree that what's needed are engineers who can consistently produce predictable results. We don't want someone who chooses (or worse, creates!) an esoteric language to pursue their art. But I myself am of the latter persuasion, "writing lisp for fun". And having a team of only non-artistic engineers would be so boring. But then again, boring is what we need most of the time.
As a reformed former dev lead, I wanted a consistent industry standard idiomatic method of writing code and I used a combination of static analysis tools and code reviews to establish a culture to do just that.
I don’t want my C# developers who came from Java writing an AbstractFactoryFacadeBeanProxyDecaratorSingleton.
“Fun” for me is doing anything except being in front of a computer after hours. Between time with my wife, exercise, learning Spanish and just vegging out, computers are the last thing on my mind. I don’t even have a personal computer anymore.
That reminds me of an excerpt from this humorous (but still relatable) bit of writing: https://www.stilldrinking.org/programming-sucks
> Every programmer occasionally, when nobody’s home, turns off the lights, pours a glass of scotch, puts on some light German electronica, and opens up a file on their computer. It’s a different file for every programmer. Sometimes they wrote it, sometimes they found it and knew they had to save it. They read over the lines, and weep at their beauty, then the tears turn bitter as they remember the rest of the files and the inevitable collapse of all that is good and true in the world.
> This file is Good Code. It has sensible and consistent names for functions and variables. It’s concise. It doesn’t do anything obviously stupid. It has never had to live in the wild, or answer to a sales team. It does exactly one, mundane, specific thing, and it does it well. It was written by a single person, and never touched by another. It reads like poetry written by someone over thirty.
> Every programmer starts out writing some perfect little snowflake like this. Then they’re told on Friday they need to have six hundred snowflakes written by Tuesday, so they cheat a bit here and there and maybe copy a few snowflakes and try to stick them together or they have to ask a coworker to work on one who melts it and then all the programmers’ snowflakes get dumped together in some inscrutable shape and somebody leans a Picasso on it because nobody wants to see the cat urine soaking into all your broken snowflakes melting in the light of day. Next week, everybody shovels more snow on it to keep the Picasso from falling over.
Early in my career I thought of software as art. I was wrong.
The very last thing I want in any production software team is an artist looking to express themselves. I want the worlds most talented engineers who want to use consistent proven methods to create solid maintainable code with zero surprises.
Code as art has its place, granted, but that place is in the privacy of your own time in a repository with one single contributor. I occasionally still go back to writing lisp for fun, but it has no place in production.