[wdrw]

I disagree that "supporting the manager's career" is necessarily at odds with creativity. Once you reach a certain level of knowledge in a workplace (problem domain knowledge, codebase knowledge, etc), different options appear to deal with each incoming Jira. You can solve them naively, or you can solve them creatively to produce better results and set up the codebase for more success in the future, or you can even (surprisingly often!) question some assumptions and find a way to not even do the work as-originally-specced but rather substitute some simpler version. These latter options make your team (and thus your manager) look even better, there's no conflict of interest here. Sure, this doesn't work with grunt-level "move this button over here" tasks, but presumably after you've actually built up the knowledge I was talking about earlier, you're assigned more interesting and challenging tasks (which are never in short supply).