IT Sector - The Creativity Killer?

Ah yes, work. You don’t really want it, but you can’t live without it! For most of my working life, I’ve been involved in the IT industry to one degree or another, whether that’s as a Tier 1 Tech Support guy, a business development rep or, in my current role, as an analyst. My blogs have been running in parallel to that for most of that period, with my German blog starting back in September 2009 and this one following two years later. Through all this time, my output has waxed and waned, and yet, I’ve always had that feeling that I could be more productive, produce more articles. Now, this drive to self-improvement is of course innate to most of us, at least those out there who actually produce content. Yet for some reason, a feeling began to take hold over the last few years that this creative output was being held back by my job, by the industry that I’m working in. Granted, my current employer can be a harsh mistress, but is it really an issue, or has my mind been playing tricks on me? Let’s take a look.

Take a look at the careers section of pretty much every IT company these days, and you’ll see companies promising prospective job seekers that they’ll be able to do their best work with them, that they’ll be able to implement their ideas and be creative. Of course, once you’re in, that picture tends to change radically, and most employees are pretty much reduced to drones. Granted, I haven’t come across a company that designates their employees as “5 of 10, Tertiary Adjunct of Unimatrix 1”, though I wouldn’t be surprised if someone has tried it already. The demands of such a job will inevitably take their toll either way, and chances are you’ll have days, weeks, or months where you feel like every bit of originality is being drained from your body. This is not necessarily reflected by the actual data on the ground, however. To be fair, quantifying creativity is always a challenge, ask anyone who’s involved with marketing, and I’ll be the first to admit that I’m working off a rather limited data set. However, as someone who has spent almost a decade working in some of the most well-known and demanding companies in the industry, My output in blog articles is certainly a decent indicator. I mean, I somehow have to think those articles up before I publish them.

For the purposes of this blog post, I went back to 2012, the year I emigrated to Ireland, and determined the number of articles published each year on both my English and German blogs. I then further broke down the data by factoring in the employer for each year, which also meant that I had to have dual entries for 2016 and 2019, since I moved between jobs that year. My working theory was that there would be a distinct drop in blog posts from 2019 onwards across both my blogs as I moved into my current job. Looking at the data, this really isn’t reflected, however. Granted, there are some inaccuracies, I attributed all of the articles for 2012 to working at Apple, even though I was with DHL for the first half of that year and only moved to Ireland in August 2012. Likewise, three months of articles for 2016 have been attributed to my tenure at VMware, even though I was between jobs for three months in the spring of 2016. And of course, the big one is that we're barely halfway through 2021. Still, there are some surprising revelations hiding in the data. 

For starters, there is no uniform drop in posts from 2019 onwards. Granted, 2019 saw a bit of a low point with 19 published posts, which was down from 28 in 2018, 24 in 2017 and 25 in 2016 for my English blog. However, this was followed up by 25 posts in 2020 and, at the time of writing this at the end of May 2021, 12 published posts for 2021, with two more already scheduled for publication. Even more surprising is the fact that at the beginning of my third year at my current employer, I’ve already surpassed the total number of articles I published during my time at Apple, a time which I’d considered to be much more productive than it apparently was. 

That’s not the whole picture, as the data for my German blog tells a completely different story. There, a steady drop in published articles in clearly visible. Once again, it is not related to my new job though, as the decline started in 2017, and has continued since then. Of course, 2017 is a pretty notable year for me personally, as it is the year in which my parents, who of course lived back in Germany, passed away. Apart from the personal trauma, this loss also meant less visits to Germany, and as such, less exposure to Germany-specific topics that might appeal to a German audience. Interestingly, this drop also coincided with a topical shift on my German blog, with more and more critical pieces about my country of birth and how it was failing to meet the challenges of our times. I guess when six out of your last seven trips home dealt with the loss of a loved one or the fallout from that, it does colour your perspective of that country. 

So, where do I stand at the end of this little statistical sojourn? Well, for one, it clearly shows that the picture we paint of ourselves in our mind doesn’t always reflect reality, sometimes in a drastic way. Coming into the Excel shenanigans that are the basis of this blog post, I was convinced that my blogging output had plummeted ever since joining my current employer, something that is not reflected in the statistics. At the same time, I was surprised by the severe impact the loss of my parents had on my German blog. I’d recognised that I’d slacked off over on the German side, but I hadn’t expected it to be so drastic. Then again, given what happened to me in 2017, a major impact should probably have been expected. 

Furthermore, it shows that work, particularly work in the IT industry, is far from the creativity killer I’d expected it to be going into this. That is not to say your job doesn’t have an impact, but from what I can see in the data, it appears to be more role-related rather than industry related. My time at Apple was spent in tightly controlled customer service roles, while my tenure at VMware and in my current job have each given me far more freedom and have been far less stressful.

Most importantly though, it showed to me that I have a far more negative view of myself than appears to be justified according to the data. I haven’t really slacked off as much as I felt I had, and I’m on track to at least equal my writing output of 2020 this year, at least on my English blog. With me hopefully having more exposure to Germany once again as part of increased business travel, I’m optimistic I’ll also be able to increase my output over on my German blog again. I guess that’s the main takeaway from this whole thing, we are generally better than we give ourselves credit for.