[srpablo]

> Repeat after me, "my creative energy should be spent on my customers"

"I should save my energy, so I won't exercise."

"I should save money, so I won't deploy it towards investments."

I don't think "creativity" is a zero-sum, finite resource; I think it's possible to generate more by spending it intelligently. And he pointed out how moving towards immutable infrastructure, while more "standard," directly hurt customers (the engineering team lost deployment velocity and functionality), so it's especially weird to end your comment the way you did.

To say "immutable infrastructure is just more straightforward" so definitively, from the limited information you have, is just you stating your biases. The stateful system he describes the company moving away from may also have been pretty "straightforward" and "boring," just with different fixed points. Beauty in the eye of the beholder and all that.

[from-nibly]

Creative energy is fairly zero sum though. You can't spend 100% of your day producing creative works. It's taxing, it takes time, it takes failures. Abstractions are one way engineers take away the requirement for creative energy and build on top of it. We don't start our jobs inventing an operating system for our new job so we can start to write some programs with it, we just use linux/macos/windows, and move on. You don't need to be creative with the video driver on your laptop while you build some business crud app, and you don't need to be creative with your infrastructure either. UNLESS that is where your company will succeed. Spend all of your creative energy there.