Master in fine art here, with a focus on print making with lithography stone... as you can guess, not a lot of work, and hoping to get a show and sell is not exactly something where you get lot of money, even if you're not bad. Since luck and hope ran out after eating too much pasta for a while, I jumped ship when a friend ask me to join him at his small shop — too much work for one guy, and I seem to know a shit or two about programming, being a true old school geek. So we started doing iOS dev together, and with some work (first with the programming iOS for dummy, in 2009) I did get good at it, as with some PHP/Python... well, whatever was thrown at me. I would not say my art background is especially useful in my day to day. In fact, in all honesty I have no idea how it is for everyone else... Being honest, curious and eager to learn is what has pushed me forward the most. There's downside though of not having followed a formal curriculum : lack of knowledge in algorithm, math... But well, working diligently about those helps. I know I won't ever be able to apply to Google or other company alike because of that , but I don't care. I've worked for small shop, startups, big telco on main product, so there's always a path forward :)