[opportune]

That’s fair, I think I strawmanned you a bit - I know you’re not arguing that taking a creative approach to software will automatically add value.

To your point about Google, that approach did lead to gmail, but also many abandoned projects like Buzz and Reader that led to Google’s infamous reputation for canceling products.

My original point remains: I think the business requirements and goals should inform the culture and hiring processes of a company. If you don’t need to deviate from the playbook to get things done, why should you? And not every developer wants to deviate from the playbook either, some prefer stable predictable work - while I’m not personally in that camp I think it’s not a moral failing, doing unpredictable things is more stressful as more things can go wrong, you might have to work more or suffer the consequences of delays/starting over, etc.

If you’re a bank, or a web consultancy, you want boring and predictable solutions. Conversely if you’re OpenAi you want people willing to reason from first principles and invent crazy new things because you’re shipping cutting edge technology at massive scale - and I think they’re doing that. So I guess I’m left wondering where exactly you think opportunities are being left on the table due to overly rote software development practices that would be improved by creativity?