Comment by spaceribs | Hacker News Reader

Comment by spaceribs | Hacker News Reader

BFA student turned full stack developer here. I wanted to actually share WHY artists can really excel in this space, both positive and negative:

1. We've been trained to critique, and communicate issues constructively. This is absolutely essential to working quickly, the sooner you realize there is an existential problem with what you're doing, the sooner you can work through them. I've become an absolute user story master because of what I learned at art school.

2. Self management, I prefer to work alone because I get the best work done when I can juggle and understand all the variables of the task. This forces me to be adept at a lot of different things but also means that as a developer you can pretty much leave me alone unless I really suck at something.

3. Asking why all the time, critiquing is one thing but the worst experiences I've had are when other developers say things like "It's always been like this". For example, I came into a shop where their build process had an SCSS linter that would error if anyone tried to use a color that wasn't a variable. This ended up creating the habit of a single stylesheet with around 200 slight adjustments of colors. Critical thinking is whats important for building systems with low technical debt, and I think artists are able to realize something is turning into technical debt much quicker than their engineer counterparts.

The tradeoff is that I have a huge communication gap with traditional computer scientists, I really have to work and study algorithms on my spare time and I still struggle heavily with mathematical notations.

Ah yeah, the critiquing aspect is spot on. In my first programming job, my supervisor would try to be as gentle as possible in telling me why my code was wrong. I had to essentially say "dude, just tell me my code sucks and then tell my why!" I didn't realize how thick of a skin I have due to my arts background.

Totally agreed. Actors and artists have to develop a thick skin or else they would whimper daily. :D

Any job where you are sort of putting yourself out there in the form of your work can be quite demoralizing, especially with the wrong people in charge. Programmers can be just as touchy about their work as artists--I've seen it personally. Some of this may have to do with cultural diffs. Some cultures seem (at least to me, with limited exposure) to be more or less amenable to "being nice" about criticism.

To a degree, the same goes for scientists. Having anonymous peer reviewers telling you the past six months of your professional life has been a waste, because this was done by a Czhechoslovakian in '73 (paper never translated) and turns out to be uninteresting, can be quite demoralising.

Or like one of my first papers, when sending it to a very good journal, having one reviewer say "this is all wrong" and the other saying "this is a well known result in the field, nothing new" and the editor just saying "reject".

Don't professional software developers feel the same way about crafting a masterful function, only to find their feature had already been implemented years ago?

Somehow, this industry thrives in reinventing the wheel in slightly different ways - once a process is implemented mathematically (in code), it has to be reimplemented again, in slightly different terms (another programming language). We bikeshed in that it's cognitively easier to manually reimplement the function, instead of mathematically determining how to "rephrase" the math in the other terms. When you want 2 wheels, making a slightly different wheel is mentally easier than copying the existing wheel - in terms of coding.

> Don't professional software developers feel the same way about crafting a masterful function, only to find their feature had already been implemented years ago?

Although I find it weird to call myself a professional, I don't really feel the same way because I usually enjoy the process of doing it and figuring it out for myself. I suspect that I might feel differently if my compensation were directly tied to coming up with new things though.

No. We don't. There's nothing in the world like standing up on stage in front of thousands of people and having a mistake creep into your work and having people write about it in every newspaper there is.

Code review is absolutely nothing compared to what it takes to put yourself out there as a musician or a scientist and have it shot down. Absolutely not even close.

And scientists have the safety rail of peer-review prior to a public mistake. Musicians have the same thing in studio, but not live.

I'm not sure why software developers should care about originality at the function level? If it's been implemented before, that just makes it easier to implement it again. (I assume there's a reason you can't just reuse or copy-and-paste the code - if you can, just do that.)

There is plenty of work to be done that's essentially translating an idea from one situation to another. The satisfaction is from solving the user's problem.

An architect (housing) must deal, daily, with the whys of his work, not only technically but also metaphysically. If an idea/concept is not rock solid, veto players will smash it in seconds. Once they are used to have their work criticized[1] it takes a lot to butthurt them.

[1] Top architectural offices do mostly competition work. It's not uncommon that one architectural competition has hundreds of participants and only one winner.

> "I didn't realize how thick of a skin I have due to my arts background."

Unfortunately, I think this says more about the programmers today and the culture they expect, rather than your resilience.

(that's not meant to imply that you're not resilient, by the way).

Don't underestimate the brutality of art school critiques. Most fields wouldn't tolerate it, not just programming.

Things can get brutal in art school indeed! I think that a big part of this (and its one of the parts that would be less tolerated in say, and engineering school) is that there can at times be a significant political dimension to the criticism. That is to say that the critiques are nominally focused on such and such a technique or choice of subject matter, but are actually about aligning oneself with a faction advocating the trend du jour or that one professor who hates anything X. Having said that, this sort of stuff certainly happens in business settings as well, which supports GGPs point.

Freshman year, at least one person would run out of each class crying during critique. First year is all about destroying everything you know about art and yourself so that you can be rebuilt, it's soul crushing but necessary to push people outside their comfort zone.

The politics are interesting, but predictable and usually die out by junior year. Everyone gets hard critiques and even best friends know they should be pushing each other to be amazing and not let bullshit slide, that's the point of being there.

True. I saw a few put to tears. A small handful washed out, too. 70-80 hour weeks of work, and harsh realities. It's not as easy as some think, depending on the school and program selected.

I have a BFA in Glass Sculpture and am now a full stack dev and business owner.

I agree with the points here but would like to add one thing. "The Creative Process". In learning how to create successful art work, you discover and become entrenched in this.

You learn how to take an idea and move it through phases of conception, sketching, planning, material/media choice and collection, prototyping, iteration, critique/feedback, execution, refinement, polish, installation, transporting, storage, transaction, and sometimes defense of concept.

All of these processes are part of making art. To developers, some of this may sound familiar!

An appreciation of process and an understanding that every action and choice is part of that process can attribute to success in development. Artists who enjoy the creative process are likely to succeed in other disciplines which require extensive processes.

Couldn't agree more with one and two.

The understanding with most art is that it takes several rounds of critique for a piece to even be complete, much less for an artist to reach their overall potential. And it's considered an honor to receive criticism from someone whose work you admire.

Similarly, self-management is completely necessary if you're completing something long-term, like a novel. Scrappiness, too -- it's very often the case that you have to skip around the gatekeepers to reach an audience for the first time.

I'd also add that there's a certain strange cognitive advantage. A lot of art is built on taking concepts from one situation and applying them somewhere foreign -- translating the feeling of loss into a series of musical notes, or applying the principles of the punk rock movement to dance.

I know it sounds like bullshit to a lot of hackers. But that trick, of abstracting away the details of problems so that their solutions can be used in isomorphic situations, is very handy in computer science.

I met a master of music once, he did mainly math and algorithms at his current job.

He said, he didn't think this would go hand in hand, but after he saw some algorithm stuff from a friend he was surprised how easy it was, so he switched from composing to coding algos.

There's a very strong relationship between music and math as skills, for some reason. It's been commented on and studied in quite a few places.

I have no idea why the relationship is so strong, but it is!

Yes, I've heard and read about that a few times, too.

Good pattern recognition skills (as in the general meaning of the word 'patterns', not necessarily design patterns), may be part of the reason, since patterns occur in both code and math.

I can definitely relate here. I've got a BA in music and an art minor, and am currently going back for an MS in Information Technology. I feel like the background in Art helps me grok abstraction quickly, but I have trouble when it gets down into the quantitative analysis part (though I'm getting better the more I learn).

I think studying art also helps you to recognize function and form, even in code. I know that the code I've written during the last few years, since I started a degree in creative writing, is much more cohesive and elegant than the code I wrote during the first two decades of my career.

Yes. Many artists have the skills necessary to become great advocates for the user because they have developed a healthily individualistic attitude.

I'd say artists are a bit less conscientious, in general, than CS graduates, which makes them less well-suited to managing technical complexity and avoiding future problems. I wonder if your idea that artists are good at detecting technical debt might be something specific to you, rather than a generic trait of artists?

Yeah, that's definitely a possibility, but I'd like to say it was my designer's intuition that quickly speaks up and says "Nah, that's a crappy approach, I don't know why yet but dig deeper and fix this nagging feeling of terrible."

Hey did you end up going back to school for a computer science degree or are you self taught?

I'm self taught, but my job is becoming more computer science focused every day. I have a lot to catch up on and study in the coming year to keep up to bridge what I already know from building applications to the computer science concepts I lack.

Art major, here, and I agree with these points. Critical thinking, communication, and creative problem solving are all very valuable skills to bring to a development team.

The 2+ years of art history is somewhat less helpful...

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