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Are creative people unemployable?

bluishgreen 16y ago
I have the same question. Perhaps the only good way for creative people is to employ themselves. Be entrepreneurs.
nostrademons 16y ago
It depends where. There're several companies that thrive on hiring creative people and then giving them nearly free reign - Google, finance, think tanks. They tend to be fairly hard to get into, because there are a limited number of positions open for creative knowledge workers and a lot of people who think they're creative. Also, in many cases you have to "pay your dues" before you can do high-level creative work. This is not because management is cruel, but because "thinking outside the box" requires knowing where the box is. If you take a bunch of random people with no experience in a field and ask them to dream up wild-eyed solutions to outstanding problems, many of them will come up with the same wrong answer. If those people then learn a little about other ideas that people have had and why they didn't work, then they can come up with novel, original contributions that actually work.
- HSO 16y ago
  "[F]inance" or "think tanks" is kind of broad. You probably mean small- to medium-sized hedge funds in finance (or their equivalent prop desks, as far as they still exist, in investment banks) because otherwise I can't think of finance as a place for creative natures. Most bank divisions and asset managers have set rules and procedures for everything and force you into using their software (environments), like Excel or Matlab or C# or Windows. I'm not saying those are bad in general, it's just I myself hate them and there's absolutely no way I could work for an operation that uses them, which precludes me from practically 98 percent of firms in the industry (ok, I pulled that one out of a hat). Also, although I generally agree with Merton's point that "first you have to show you can do it like them, then you can show you can do better", I think more and more this applies only outside of "paradigm shifts" in Thomas Kuhn's sense. During such shifts, or to propel them, one may do better by totally disregarding the viewpoint of the old guard and "just do". EDIT: Of course, one would still need to have thought enough about the "old" way of doing or explaining things that one would know why the "old" way failed, in a fundamental way. For example, I think in economics and finance, the fundamental failure is not so much in the statistical assumptions (that is actually a pretty cheap shot to make, theory-wise, Herr Taleb!) but in aggregation.
hellosamdwyer 16y ago
Everybody fits into a role somehow.

I have the same question. Perhaps the only good way for creative people is to employ themselves. Be entrepreneurs.

It depends where. There're several companies that thrive on hiring creative people and then giving them nearly free reign - Google, finance, think tanks. They tend to be fairly hard to get into, because there are a limited number of positions open for creative knowledge workers and a lot of people who think they're creative. Also, in many cases you have to "pay your dues" before you can do high-level creative work. This is not because management is cruel, but because "thinking outside the box" requires knowing where the box is. If you take a bunch of random people with no experience in a field and ask them to dream up wild-eyed solutions to outstanding problems, many of them will come up with the same wrong answer. If those people then learn a little about other ideas that people have had and why they didn't work, then they can come up with novel, original contributions that actually work.

HSO 16y ago
"[F]inance" or "think tanks" is kind of broad. You probably mean small- to medium-sized hedge funds in finance (or their equivalent prop desks, as far as they still exist, in investment banks) because otherwise I can't think of finance as a place for creative natures. Most bank divisions and asset managers have set rules and procedures for everything and force you into using their software (environments), like Excel or Matlab or C# or Windows. I'm not saying those are bad in general, it's just I myself hate them and there's absolutely no way I could work for an operation that uses them, which precludes me from practically 98 percent of firms in the industry (ok, I pulled that one out of a hat). Also, although I generally agree with Merton's point that "first you have to show you can do it like them, then you can show you can do better", I think more and more this applies only outside of "paradigm shifts" in Thomas Kuhn's sense. During such shifts, or to propel them, one may do better by totally disregarding the viewpoint of the old guard and "just do". EDIT: Of course, one would still need to have thought enough about the "old" way of doing or explaining things that one would know why the "old" way failed, in a fundamental way. For example, I think in economics and finance, the fundamental failure is not so much in the statistical assumptions (that is actually a pretty cheap shot to make, theory-wise, Herr Taleb!) but in aggregation.

hellosamdwyer 16y ago

Everybody fits into a role somehow.