Great Software Entrepreneurs Are Artists | Hacker News Reader

Great Software Entrepreneurs Are Artists

robertsaric.com

23 pointsvonical12 comments

Great software entrepreneur MAY be artists, but it isn't a necessity. Just because you craft or make something doesn't inherently make you an artist. Are the people who make sandwiches at Subway really "sandwich artists"?

That said, an appreciation for the arts most certainly affects one's eye for design and taste. It is the difference between a good looking/feeling app and a great one. So much can and should be borrowed from the arts to build products, but perhaps such a loose definition of "artist" is unhelpful.

On the other hand I think this definition of art is too limited. Are sandwich's art, of course not but art is about creating and communicating beauty/emotion from were it didn't exist. Is software art, it's hard to say. I tend to think software/code is something else. Some that is newer and different than art but that borrows heavily from art. I guess the difference is that I think the code itself is the art rather than the output. That said I may be to close to have a fair viewpoint, I've named two companies based on variants of the name Code art.

> Are sandwich's art, of course not

Obviously, you have never had a masterful sandwich.

Agree with that.

I'd say there's two types of software - better experience and novel functionality. You can in be a competitive business and win by offering superior service/design or go into non-competitive markets and offering functionality you can't get anywhere else.

Personally I prefer the noval functionality, being an engineering type, and slide a little on the design, but there's equally as much money in going the artistic route.

There's great technical risk in the functionality route, but there's great market risk in going the artistic route. Steve Blank talks about this in his writings.

The Lean Startup movement is about this market risk. To get a handle on technical risk you'd be better off listening to Elon Musk.

All great points. Software is regarded by many as a science, art, trade, and craft all in one. Some software does have a wow factor. Games are like that, but much other software is deeply utilitarian. I wonder, too, about the usefulness of distinguishing art from craft, or artist from artisan. The fine arts, whose end is the beautiful ("that which, being seen, pleases"), and the other arts, whose end is service to people.

Don't get caught up on the word "art" or "artists." There's a great article by Carolyn Dean[0] that goes into depth about the history of the word and the problems with it. What I got out of it is that "calling something art reveals nothing inherent in the object to which the term is applied; rather, it reveals how much the viewer values it."

As a software developer, I consider software itself art because I understand the various complexities that arise when creating it, and also how it transforms hardware into something completely different (without software, hardware does nothing.)

Would I compare software to painting, sculpture, or music? Definitely. But that's just me, and before you can convince anyone else otherwise, you first need to convince them to value software as much as you do. The same goes for anything: fashion, cooking, even natural objects and phenomena.

[0]http://www.bucknell.edu/Documents/GriotInstitute/DeanArticle...

(And just to clarify, I wouldn't consider all software "art", but neither do I consider all paintings "art" - it's really about the user's/viewer's experience interacting with the piece.)

To me engineering in general has a lot in common with art. Most customers never see the inside of a gearbox or a PCB. They don't marvel at the design of the lens or touchscreen in their cellphone. The difference between an "artist" and "engineer" is just the intent of the product and even that's a sliding scale.

Excluding the most rarified fine art, every creative endeavor is a balancing act of money, materials, time, and effort. Good taste and a sense of art is going to guide you to the best result that balances all those factors. What's different about software is that everyone who makes software for public consumption needs taste and artistry.

Once you have your creation, you just flip a switch and as many editions as anyone would want can be created. This makes the boundary between art and commerce in software almost friction-free, unlike, say, designing a car where a factory costing hundreds of millions of dollars is interposed between design and replication.

There are only a handful of big car producers and they only collectively need something on the order of hundreds to low thousands of trained designers. To these designers, art is part of their education. That's just not going to be the case for software developers.

I think this is very true. A lot of software engineers are very smart technically but are not good at designing products or understanding user experience. Everything is just 1s and 0s to them and rigid. I think the metaphor of a mural is a good one.

I feel like this article is close but slightly off the mark. Just noticing from casual observation, it seems like the point can be summed up even more succinctly:

Great software engineers are (something else).

After a lengthy argument with my coworker, we have arrived at the conclusion that everything may be art. Commence discussion below.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com