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Comment by reaperducer | Hacker News Reader

You can be creative and still act like a professional in a professional environment.

One example is advertising agencies, which in the last century (in spite of what you see on popular television) were very button-up places but created cultural touchstones we still know today.

(Edited to clarity I'm referencing ad agencies in the 20th century, not the SV-wannabe agencies a few have evolved into today.)

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My brother worked in ad agencies, and this is the opposite of what he said. Tons of drinking and just generally bad behavior which would only be tolerated in the worst silicon valley startups. He moved to the startup world because it has a healthier work culture.

One of my first jobs out of college was for a digital agency. Shortly after I started we were bought by a very large ad agency and it was shocking how casual alcohol and drug use were at our parent company. Luckily we were insulated enough that it didn't permeant our culture until after I left.

We are surrounded by functional alcoholics (10% in the US drink most of the booze). They naturally tend toward career paths that support their behavior.

90% of people surrounded by 10% ? The word "surrounded" seems inappropriate.

Maybe a better word could have been chosen. But in perspective, almost every team on average has at least one person with an alcohol problem of some sort.

and then there's Ireland.

Surrounded =/= Majority

Since when were advertising agencies button-up affairs? Crispin Porter is down the street from me and they seem to be every silly brogrammer stereotype, just in a different market.

Like their shuttle looks like a prison bus but is labeled "disruptive thinkers transport" or some such. That's Mike Judge levels of ridiculousness.

> Like their shuttle looks like a prison bus but is labeled "disruptive thinkers transport" or some such.

You're joking, right?

looks like they're not: https://static.businessinsider.com/image/4f3c01186bb3f7d71d0...

It appears to be real

http://boulderreporter.com/a-crispin-porter-bogusky-primer/

I wish I could bold this comment and pin it to the top.

It's absolutely a false dichotomy to assert that there can either be creativity or there can be constraints.

As a game developer, I look no further than the numerous game jams with artificial constraints as evidence that creativity can flourish within the confines of constraints. One might even argue that creativity is given constructive direction by way of constraints.

I didn't say constraints, I said emotions.

I don't believe it's possible to have creativity without emotions, and I've got citations to that point (which are apparently quite controversial, that comment has been fluctuating heavily in score) [1].

It's possible to put constraints on your emotions and to not immediately do something because you feel like doing it. This is the essence of emotional intelligence, and of maturity. The thing is that this is a conscious process: you are expending your limited attention on watching your behavior and ensuring it conforms to the desired norms. (If you internalize those norms such that conformance is unconscious - well, then you've internalized the existing norms, but the point of creativity is that you're trying to break out of those unconsciously-internalized customs.) That means you're not expending that attention on the details of the problem itself. Most of the problems involved in revolutionizing an industry with computer code are immensely complex and require all the attention you can give them.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21548499

That's an interesting argument: can creativity exist without emotions?

It speaks directly to the nature of creativity. Is creativity simply the discovery of the new; or is it an expression of desire for the new? Is it something else?

Hmm...

Although, to the original concern: I don't believe constraints on behaviour necessarily constrain emotions; such constraints influence emotions, but I wouldn't expect a general suppression of emotion.

I doubt I'll be the only meditator that disagrees with you, on every point, regardless of citations.

I work at one of the largest, oldest agencies there is and have worked before in big tech and in startups, and to be honest people in ad agencies are pretty open about controversial opinions around politics. I'd say the workers are, in general (as in, if you pick one randomly) more to the left side of the spectrum as in any arts-related organization, but as in any company there are different people from all sides - a left, liberal, atheist director hiring a right wing, conservative, Catholic worker is just normal, people don't bother too much with this kind of personal stuff. My take is that the difference comes from the business model - agencies (as consulting firms) are client-facing and don't scale as pure tech companies so there's always some big, influential clients to please, so people tend to stop personal opinions from getting in the way of business, while in pure tech where engineers are far from their customers, politics become something relevant in the workplace.

Advertising agencies are lot smaller than 100K employees. Also if there are very big agencies they are distributed and individual country/city offices are responsible for clients. Beyond corporate functions there are no business "best practices" to be enforced by headquarters.

WPP alone is 130k. There are a few at that scale, just like the vast, vast majority of tech companies aren't Google's scale.

WPP is a holding company for a number of smaller agencies - having previously worked for a holding company-owned agency (holding companies dominate the advertising agency space), no one considers themselves e.g. a WPP employee, and culture is very much set at the individual agency level.

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