Artists Who Code, a group helping artists switch careers to tech | Hacker News Reader

Artists Who Code, a group helping artists switch careers to tech

latimes.com

49 pointslinux264766 comments

> Going from zero to software engineer might require enrolling in a boot camp that can cost about $16,000.

I'll be honest, part of me hurts a little realizing that I've dumped so much of my life into a career that so many people think of as being so rudimentary. Then again, these people spent at least as much time learning to perform for peanuts, and they watch as manufactured pop stars who can barely sing make millions.

You should have left off the second sentence, then no one would know whether you were an artist or a coder.

The point of my comment was empathy.

I too work a basic/easy engineering job to fund my creative pursuits.

One could argue that if the work one does could be done by a boot camper, then that work is inherently lower-value than work that could not.

One of the best engineers I know is a guy basically in nearly 300,000$ of art history school debt lol.

How? Did he pay for a full-time PhD out-of-pocket?

OT: does anyone know any groups for making the opposite switch (tech to art)?

If you are interested in this sort of thing, I've observed that indie videogame development offers quite a lot of opportunity to jump between code and art for people with the right skillsets. I also suspect that there's a lot of freelance gigs that would offer the same, since a lot of people seem to think that "Unity Developer" or "Unreal Developer" should be able to handle both graphics and code.

This is actually a good suggestion. As a passionate software developer, I realized that artists that learn coding have an edge in game dev for single player games, where the quality of the code is way less relevant.

As a developer but not artist, I have no such edge.

Of course game design is the other big beast.

Alcoholics Anonymous

Generative art is really gaining a lot of recognition in the NFT space. It doesn't have to be on chains like Ethereum either. Fxhash is a generative art marketplace on Tezos. I encourage you to check it out and play with it. The communities exist mostly on Twitter and Discord and are very supportive.

I’m sorry what? Generative art never used to be about making monkeys with random accessories, the artificially designated scarcity of which could be used to boost some cryto bros wallet.

Edit: i see now, fxhash isn’t quite that, but mentioning generative art and blockchain got my hackles up immediately.

I have a hard time seeing generative art as a market for single pieces, but you can get work as a vj

I understand the knee-jerk reaction, but no I don't mean the PFPs. I mean algorithmic design. There is actually a really solid market for it in the NFT space: artblocks.io for example. Don't dismiss it outright.

I think they mean for artists of conviction.

Art is a pretty broad category. Any particular sort of art you're interested in?

Next time you're at Trader Joe's just ask the cashier about it on the way out, if they aren't an artist they'll certainly know someone in the store who is.

Kidding (sort of) aside, I've known a surprisingly large number of professional artists and all of them had a primary source of income that had a much smaller salary than a software engineer. None of them could subsist entirely from art.

It's an unfortunate reality that artists, unless they're focused on something "practical" like wedding photography, really can barely scrape by as a career, and that nearly always includes having a part time job and a partner with full time income to make it even possible. Even people like professional symphony musicians often need an extra job to get by.

If you're in tech and interested in the arts I would start making art in the evenings. If you have a laid back tech job you should have plenty of time to devote to what you're interested in and will have an income, even at a low paying tech job, that will make you the perpetual envy of the artist friends you make along the way.

tl;dr there is no such thing as a "career" in art. If you're passionate about art, just start making it.

> If you're tech and interested in the arts I would start making art in the evenings. If have a laid back tech job you should have plenty of time to devote to what you're interested in and will have an income, even at a low paying tech job, that will make you the perpetual envy of the artist friends you make along the way.

The laid back tech job is tricky to wrangle in my experience. Like people inevitably say in all the blue-collar threads on HN, tech jobs have a way of sticking in your brain well after the official workday is done. That really dampens my creative energies. It could be that I'm not picking sufficiently laid-back jobs though! I've always wondered, what sort of tech areas would be the most laid back? Enterprise stuff? Government work?

Drawing doesn't really require a lot of 'creative energies' when you're learning. It's mostly mindless grinding of fundamentals, and that can go on for months or years. You should just start doing it to see if you actually like it. There's a billion resources on drawing and painting out there these days, not like it's some esoteric secret.

I make art all the time, during work hours even! I work remote though.

Sorry, maybe I should have clarified: I'm approaching this as an artist that has had time and creative energy sapped by the tech industry, trying to figure out what sort of tech work would let me tip the balance away from tech and back towards art.

Something in operations like DevOps or SRE. I've been doing it for 10 years and I've had weeks and months where I basically do nothing. :V

Devops at mature company, sure. Devops at a small startup is one of the most stressful jobs you can have, because people use it as a catch-all for security engineer, backend engineer, and 24/7 oncall.

Freelancing could make this possible, you can work in spurts on small projects and do art in between. Also boring jobs like insurance, finance, car companies, and similar corporate america non-tech companies can be pretty chill.

I would recommend (if you're serious) to reduce hours and make art every Friday. Most in tech make enough to continue your life, quite a lot earn less than your 4 day week. Making it in the evening is quite taxing if you're want to create some good.

Not exactly, but I'm working on something that I hope enables independent musicians just a little bit. TBD.

That said, I'm one of those artists who was consumed by tech because I have a lifelong interest in computers. Working on an out myself. Life's short, and it's really happening. My patience for scrums and HR-organized slack #donut meetings is waning. That's not the life I enjoy living, or want to promote to my possible children.

If you're an artist, I recommend doing research into grants. I'm from Canada where our current federal government improved the grant system recently—but there are also third party organizations that offer them as well. They are attainable.

It is work to get them, and you have responsibilities—like tracking valid expenses, some deliverables, and so on. But if it enables you to spend more time on art and less time on building half-baked software projects for cynical gold-rush pursuants (allow me my facetious remarks) then it's worth it. They're not going to pay your entire way, but they will help subsidize expenses for materials, studio time, promotion and marketing, exhibits and concerts, and so on.

Definitely not the same thing as art, but as far as creative entertainment goes, it would seem like nearly every major tech lifestyle YouTuber whose main focus is "Here's what it's like to work as a SWE/at FAANG" is retiring from tech to become full time YouTubers.

Sorta; the Gray Area Foundation [0] in San Francisco is a great organization that hosts and supports artistic projects that incorporate/interact with/comment on technology and society. They run courses on creative coding and host exhibitions and performances throughout the year. Their biggest event each year is the Gray Area Festival [1], which brings together an incredible collection of tech-adjacent creatives, artists and thinkers for a week of great talks, workshops and events. One of the best and most inspiring conferences I've ever been fortunate to attend.

0: https://grayarea.org/

1: https://grayareafestival.io/

First off, I'd recommend you explore art on a personal level before you start looking to apply it outwardly. What mediums do you like? What's your style? Where does your inner drive to make art come from?

Art can be incredibly rewarding just doing it for yourself, and from my perspective I'd find it hard to have an artist career without first knowing my own artistic expression.

I'd also be interested in figuring out how I can utilize my tech experience towards a more artistic kind of career. I paint outside of my day job and I wish I could bring the things I love about it, open-ended creativity, curiosity, etc, to my career.

If you've been making tech money then: leave whatever expensive-ass city you're living in, there are very few full-time artists who can afford to live in the San Francisco Bay any more. Work remotely in your tech job for a year or so, build up several years of runway, because going from "I guess I like to draw" to "I draw good enough that people are willing to pay me for my art, and enough of an audience that I can pay my rent doing this" is gonna take at least five years of it being your full-time job.

If you have a significant other who is also making tech money and is willing to keep doing it, this will be easier.

Get a Patreon or similar up as soon as possible. "Patreon paid for my drink at the artist meetup!" is a milestone worth celebrating as much as "Patreon paid all my bills this month with money to spare!".

The straightforward path has existed for most of human history:

    Step 1: make art
    Step 2: don't starve

Big difference between tech careers and art careers is you probably won't find anyone to hire you to be an artist, it's more entrepreneurial than that.

You also can't decide today, with no prior training, that you'd like to be in Broadway musicals, do a workshop or two and then get your first gig. The career change arrow doesn't point both ways even close to equally.

Continuing to be off-topic: if you're considering a change, I'll tell you from my personal experience as a creative type turned dev - devving for a living, stressful as it is, is massively less stressful than doing art.

Trying to be creative on demand is very difficult in the best of scenarios, and trying to be creative on demand when your (shitty) income relies on it is massively more so.

That's kind of depressing

Agreed. Personally, it's depressing that everyone's getting into software, increasing my competition. Societally, it's depressing that people think art is a viable career unless they don't need to care about making money.

Starving artists have been around since time immemorial but it used to be less un-viable in the past.

Starving everybody has been around since time immemorial. It doesn't mean it's relevant to our modern era (or at least not relevant in the same way).

LOL, I graduated with a degree in graphic design and an emphasis in illustration, and even got a couple of jobs in the games industry.

I had to change into software because I couldn't get fulltime work anymore and needed the benefits (I'd been coding for fun since high school - started with Flash). It was all gig jobs. Plus I make substantially more coding because "I don't get the pleasure of having the dream job of making art for video games".

Societally, the problem is that neo-liberal capitalism assigns no market value to art, but is more than willing to pay huge sums for a pixelated bald monkey.

We seem to assign a quite large market value to art. Film, television, music and book publishing are all huge industries. Add to that all the artistic pursuits that are part of every business (graphic design, some types of marketing, etc) and we almost certainly spend more on art than we ever have in the past.

That's entertainment and media.

There seems to be a recurring sentiment in the comments that we're losing artists to tech, but you know what we lose even more artists to? Commercial art.

Earning a living as an artist is tough. Most won't get their work seen in a gallery, so they turn to commercial art or graphic design. Now they learn to create art for a client that fits a brief. They do this every day for years until they lose the ability to make art for themselves. I know this happens, because it happened to me.

Learning to code was the best career decision I ever made. I now make significantly more money than I did before, which enables me to fund my own art projects on the side. I'm learning to get back in touch with why I wanted to make art in the first place. Like it or not, we all need to earn a living. In my opinion, doing so in an art-adjacent field is not somehow morally better than doing so in tech.

The difference between you and I is that we both fund our art habits via our day jobs in tech but I didn't make the change...I started this way from the get go intentionally so that I could make my art career the way I wanted (a compulsion, not an occupation).

You don't only "lose" artists to commercial art. Many choose it intentionally, because it can be its own reward. Whether it's fine artists who do comics, storyboards and magazine illustration (e.g. Bill Sienkiewicz, Kent Williams, Geof Darrow) or classic illustrators like Syd Mead, Bob Peak, Fuchs Norman Rockwell and sleeve designers like Saul Bass, Hugh Syme or Storm Thorgerson on down to weird mutant hybrids like the Emigre font house or Vaughn Olivers' v23 or the Bill Smith Studio....the line between "artist" and "commercial artist" is a blurry one.

I've moonlit as a commissioned painter and illustrator (whose work often enough ends up licensed for commercial purposes, usually book cover or musician-packaging) and I find zero issue bouncing between the two spaces. I know that is not necessarily for everyone, but its also not a small slice of folks either.

I don't disagree with anything you've said. I'm not trying to argue that all commercial art corrupts artists. So many of the artists I look up to are commercial artists themselves. I'm more attacking the idea that an artist who learns to code is something to be sad about, because it will presumably sap them of their creative energy. My counterpoint is that an artist who has to turn their work into a commodity is at risk of losing their creativity as well.

I know that it's different but at least from my perspective my passion has always been code and building things. What I really want to do is work on my own projects but I need to make money too. My job isn't particularly interesting or engaging but I am thankful that I get to write code everyday for a living and at least do things that somewhat contribute to my projects outside of work.

I don't know I just feel like the categorization is a bit unfair that doing something you love in a commercial setting will strip you of your creativity. I think to some extent work as whole through pure exhaustion does that but that's why I'm glad that I get the measly reward of doing something adjacent to what I enjoy. I'm sure I'd feel differently if tech salaries were lower but if they were identical would you really prefer writing enterprise software all day over doing commercial art?

> you know what we lose even more artists to? Commercial art

I remember a commercial for Mucinex (cough medicine) where anthropomorphic boogers get their house wrecked by a tornado courtesy of Mucinex. Somewhere in the chaos, a painting of the Mona Lisa as an anthropomorphic booger goes by. I often wonder what was going through the artist's mind while they were crafting that little detail.

Why? Art simply doesn't pay, by and large; it is, if perhaps to variable extents, a recreational pursuit as opposed to a viable profession. So it's best when people who are good at art also have other skills that they can use to get an income and further their hobby.

In the first 4 paragraphs alone the word 'software engineer' appeared 4 times. I really wonder if some of these are actual engineers, or whether the use of that word has been inflated to accommodate people who _aren't_ actually engineers.

I really don't expect most of the purported 'artists' to be actually have a substantial career in tech at all, especially if they are purely creatively-minded, and are not inclined to put in the long hours required for the technical finesse and study of writing (good) code.

You realize that many many many artist put in incredibly long and focused hours for their craft? Some Artist are very well suited for coding work, they are mentally flexible and habe high order abstraction, they can focus and keep complex structures/concepts visualized mentally and are able to make nobel decisions when problem solving (there was just an article here about how their neural pathways differ from most people).

The technical finess you speak of is only a matter of time and study, which anyone can eventually gather with hard work.

That being said, engineer is being used too broadly.

Math is where most artist fall short from the typical CS graduate, but basic math will get you for.

> there was just an article here about how their neural pathways differ from most people).

Former artist here! I'd love a link if you don't mind. I definitely bring something different to the companies I work for and I'm curious to read what that is on a scientific level.

The demoscene has plenty of "artists who code", dating back literally decades. https://www.pouet.net I really hope this isn't just some sort of lame ripoff effort, and instead will honestly try to uphold and proceed further from that kind of remarkable history.

It's something different and has nothing to do with code as art or any of those demoscene values. It's an effort to get starving artists, often from the performing arts, to sling JavaScript for megacorps so they can eat.

I've worked with a bunch of bootcampers at a previous job. I don't have good things to say. Even the good bootcamp developers still required way more oversight than a typical developer. They also made our business analyst and UI/UX team pretty angry because it was clear they wanted to do more than just be developers.

I also think a 4 software engineering degree is a waste of time. There has got to be a better middle ground like a 2 year course that teaches better fundamentals than a bootcamp, and is far more practical than a typical university degree.

> “it was clear they wanted to do more than just be developers.”

This seems like a good problem.

I guess it depends on your organization structure. My organization didn't need or want developers to be more than just developers.

We had whole teams for user research, business analysis, project management etc.

I wonder what bootcamps they recommend for their mentees to attend. Having just had a VERY negative experience at a well-regarded bootcamp, I struggle to imagine that their students end up with happy outcomes for their money.

Yea I just finished interviewing 8+ bootcamp developers for position. They really struggled, where I'm thinking bootcamps have adopted the same financial model as those really scammy for profit colleges.

They didn't "adopt the same model," they were purchased. Almost all bootcamps are owned by companies like Kaplan and the University of Phoenix. I think Lambda School is one of the very few surviving independent ones, although its reputation was so atrocious that it was forced to rebrand.

Wow I didn't know that. Thanks!

The other independent program that comes to mind easily is Ada Academy, but it accepts something like 20 students per year out of hundreds of applicants, so it's not a realistic option for basically anyone looking to enter the coding trades.

Please keep doing art. We need you so much more than another person slinging Javascript for adtech companies. Or at the very least go into design. Great designers can absolutely make or break a project, and don't need to know a single line of code.

Are you going to pay them six figures to keep doing art?

As a good designer, I hope so. I usually feel a good designer is worth way more than that.

Maybe I should try getting into that, it seems kinda soul deadening but it would be nice to make six figures off of my Illustrator skills for once. Where would I go to find people who want to pay me that kind of money?

Well the transition would be into UX design.

Just build something of a portfolio and start applying to junior UX roles. It will take a few years of experience, but senior creative directors can easily out-earn engineering directors.

I too encourage others to sacrifice their well-being for my vague sense of aesthetics.

this is straight out of Cyberpunk

instead of creating utopia, companies are doing anything to fill jobs and devalue our work

what are we folks gonna do when everyone turns into a js-monkey and we get paid pennies? maybe create art to entertain them?

> companies essentially do anything to fill jobs and devalue our work

what on earth are you talking about?

I joined the industry 15 years ago after getting a BA in theology. The history of software creation as job has never been a gated, guild-like professional one.

Everyone has always been able to become a console jockey.

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