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I've been coding professionally for almost three decades, and the pursuit of elegant solutions makes up about 1% of my paid work. The rest of the time I'm fight

• revskill 8y ago
  It depends on situations: Your location, your health, age, family, finance,... If you mostly work on a team, then it's enough to NOT create art. In my case, i MUST create art, to abstract most of boring stuffs, because of the situation. That means, i want to spend the least brain work in software engineering as possible with the help of art.
• notacoward 8y ago
  A little over three decades here, and you're absolutely right. For every hour spent developing a cool algorithm, there are likely to be at least ten spent on low-level coding details, hooking it up to its inputs and outputs elsewhere in the code, writing tests, debugging other people's tests, integrating with build systems, debugging other people's build breakage, monitoring and alarms, addressing code review nit-picks, rebasing on top of whatever my coworkers jammed in while I was being diligent, documentation, etc. Any non-trivial project will also be interrupted by meetings, project-wide direction changes, on-call shifts, and so on. If I get one uninterrupted morning/afternoon of working on "elegant solutions" in a month, that's a good month.