Did you ever think about how your creativity might be shadowed by the performance requirements you- or your management -put on your yourself ? You’ve got to achieve more with less…
I always loved solving problems, but almost one year ago I reached a point where my cognitive load was too high. Fortunately for me, my body came to the rescue, and stopped me. I suffered a panic attack caused by the fear of not being as performant as I would like.
A few weeks ago, for the first time, I made the creativity and the performance talk to each other and reconcile themselves.
They’ve acknowledged to work together instead of against each other. In my case, that required the performance to lower her expectations. Why was the performance so dominant ?
Well, first, there is my personal history. Next are my experiences at work for the last 25 years, and third, and please don’t take this the wrong way : Open Source Software. OSS is great, there is no doubt about it. One of the problem, sometimes, is the lack of comment in the code. When something does not work as expected, you’ll have to dive in the code. Both creativity and performance may be affected.
Again, it is ok. It is up to you to consider to use OSS code in commercial software. It is true for commercial software as a service offers too. They may be complex, and the documentation well done, but then you may be going “down the rabbit hole” and experience chaos and confusion.
I’ve known developers who might no want to get out of their comfort zone and will go reinventing the wheel. Creativity is this time way over performance.
Whatever the case, it is strongly tied to the context : you and your company’s mission to their customers. There is no recipe for the right balance between creativity and performance.
You- or your team as a whole – have to take the time to reflect and consider the right weight to allow to both creativity and performance. If you don’t talk openly about that, someone will suffer in the end.
Do you think that some artificial intelligence will sometimes in the near future steal your job and write code ? It may be possible one day, but I think it will be necessary – among other things – to feed her with the right levels of creativity and performance.
Happy easter weekend.
Embracing the cloud 