10 ms·

Are you a technical person?

195 points by johnfn 15y ago

niccl 15y ago
This article perpetuates a dichotomy that I have only just (at 50+) realised is false: creative versus technical. Technical people create: software and hardware often come out of nothing more than an idea. The real dichotomy that this article is getting at might be effectively described as artistic versus non-artistic, but even that is not a complete description of the distinction. Maybe it comes down to the old left-brain/right-brain thing? I used to call myself non-creative, until several good friends united to point out that I do create things, just not things that you could plausibly turn up in art galleries.
- DrHankPym 15y ago
  Really? I thought it was about building skills by just applying yourself. You don't learn guitar or Ruby in a night. You practice and play with them for years and integrate them into your projects.
  - juiceandjuice 15y ago
    Knowing how to play guitar like a virtuoso != being artistic. Head on down to Guitar Center to see what I mean.
    - Hawramani 15y ago
      I agree. If I made a robot that could follow musical notes and play the guitar perfectly, would anyone describe its playing the guitar as 'creative'? I hope not. This is a lab-like situation where we can know for sure that the robot is using zero creativity to play the guitar. It is just following instructions, it is not creating anything new. However, if the robot could create new algorithms on the fly and could use them to tweak the way it played the guitar for the better, then we could say it is a creative robot. Creative guitar players, like the second robot, invent new ways of playing a particular piece of music, or just a few seconds of it, to induce specific reactions in the listeners. This is creativity, and it seems to be rare not common, possibly because of how difficult it is to master the notes, and then to build rapport with the audience and manipulate their emotions.
      - geekzgalore 15y ago
        Exactly my thoughts.
      - geekzgalore 15y ago
        Learning something is not a creative process, but finding better ways at doing it (after learning) makes you an artist. Same rule applies to learning following skills: - Music - A programming language - Cooking
    - gallerytungsten 15y ago
      "Shredding" alone isn't virtuosity.
- ChuckMcM 15y ago
  I suffer from Artism as well :-) Which is to say as an engineer I solve problems with materials at hand in ways that meet constraints. That often requires creative thinking but the creative act is appreciated by other engineers more than lay people. I think of it as the ability to see the unseen. A very non-crisp way of describing the ability to see a solution amongst a pile of symptoms or pain points. A sculptor sees the figure 'inside' the stone, an engineer sees the solution 'amongst' the available resources. Now if I could reliably interview for it I'd be all set :-)
- Hawramani 15y ago
  We need to reach a definition of creativity before we can have any discussion about whether an activity is creative or not. A good definition I found somewhere is that creativity is the ability to create solutions for a problem, any kind of problem. A lot of creativity (if not all creativity) is the ability to assemble large objects from smaller ones, such as writing symphonies, designing a motorcycle engine, or building a computer program. Creativity is the ability to create new things. It is the ability to hear 100 jokes and make a really funny new joke, or to bring a number of words and use them in a new manner to create a creative poem. I find absolutely nothing inherently creative in a person's ability to follow musical notes and thus play the violin. The same goes for painting, and any number of other 'creative' professions. But to excel at these fields creativity seems to be necessary. Writing a novel without creativity will only produce a dull one that nobody wants to read, and the reviewers will say 'there is nothing new in it', because the author hasn't used creativity to produce new material. Programming is one of the most creative professions, it is hard to think of a better example of a creative profession, because programming is problem solving, which is creativity. Bad programmers either lack the skill and experience to build solutions, or are simply not creative enough to do it. A person's creativity is limited by their ability to hold complex problems in their brains, and different people seem to have different capacities of this brain 'RAM'. After loading a complex problem into our heads, we then need skill to manipulate the objects to make something beautiful out of them, and this ability can be severely limited by the lack of knowledge of the field. It will be hard to create elegant mathematical solutions to programming problems without some knowledge of math.
- johnfn 15y ago
  My article actually intended to do the opposite - to argue that there is no dichotomy at all. I'm interested how you got the opposite impression. Maybe I should go back and edit some more. :)
UrLicht 15y ago
While I agree with the conclusion that you only get out of something what you put in, a quick review of the history of genius will reveal several characters that did have an innate talent that was indeed cultivated through hard work, but was not learned "from scratch". You may, in fact, be the artistic type, and glean from that a certain advantage over someone who is not.
marcusestes 15y ago
If your blog is actually served up in production by Github, yeah, you're a technical person.
- Miky 15y ago
  It seems that you didn't actually read the post. Your comment is only in response to the title, and it's actually a good example of what the post was trying to combat.
  - mattgreenrocks 15y ago
    Additionally, these sorts of clever one-liners are what HN comments shouldn't be about.
  - marcusestes 15y ago
    I read the post, I just wanted to publicly appreciate the (frankly, creative) way that the blog was being hosted. Sometimes it feels like the Hacker News community wants to "place restrictions" on expressions of humor.
radagaisus 15y ago
We should act and do as though there are no limits to what we can do, but we have to remember that nature & nurture do impose boundaries. We just don't know what those boundaries are.
ricefield 15y ago
This is very interesting to me, as a computer science student, who does "techie" things like code a take a lot of technical classes, yet always been considered (or considered myself) a "artistic" person. When I was younger, my best subjects were Art and English, and my worst subject was always Math. This had continued to be true, as I consider myself much better at design than at coding or problem solving. I wouldn't say the dichotomy is necessarily true or false - I hate to think we are stuck as one or the other, and I certainly know people who are talented at both. On the other hand, in my observation, there always seems to be an inherent aptitude - I struggle and work a lot harder with "technical" things; but it can be overcome - I am still a CS student at top university, and am not a phenomenal coder, but I can keep up. For so-called "technical" people, you may or may not believe in the dichotomy, but that doesn't mean hard work can't make you better at "creative" work than "talented" others.
idan 15y ago
As a developer/designer, I spend a lot of time getting this _exact_ message across to developers who "don't do design" and designers who are afraid of code. I've given that same schpiel many times before -- in almost the exact same words ("false dichotomy", "labels", "we can be skilled at anything we dedicate ourselves to"). Can't upvote this enough.
- archgoon 15y ago
  Can you recommend any books (or projects) that would be good references for learning design?
  - juiceandjuice 15y ago
    Personally, I don't think you can learn design without appreciating it first. A good place to start is to study Bauhaus. There's tons and tons of books on Bauhaus. It's ridiculous how influential Bauhaus was on everything in western culture.
  - gallerytungsten 15y ago
    What kind of design do you want to learn? If you're just starting out, you have to break it down a bit into some of the component parts. Typography, composition, color. Print design is different than web design. 3d design is another thing entirely; and so on. Let's say the goal is print design. Get hold of a layout program, such as Quark, InDesign, or Illustrator. Start by doing basic things like business cards and letterhead. Work on just the type first. Use only 1 font at first; then different weights of the same typeface. Then start trying to add in drawn elements or even just geometric shapes. Remember: if it doesn't work in black & white, it won't work in color. When you are ready for color, keep in mind that the 3 strongest colors in design are black, white, and red. Black and red are the easier of the three; so put extra attention into the use of white (negative space).
    - usaar333 15y ago
      Unfortunately, you've really jumped the gun here. I'm a programmer who isn't so hot with design. But I certainly know how to use a program to layout objects; that's trivial to learn on the grand scheme of things. What I (and other non-designing devs) don't get is how to know what "doesn't work". I have at most a fuzzy idea of what are considered good and bad designs, much less how to produce them. One of the biggest issues is the lack of feedback. With beginning programming, you are getting constant feedback from the computer. It even tells you where you are going wrong (line numbers, variables, etc.) Design lacks such an objective feedback system. Sure, there's the times when your friends will agree that iteration B is superior to A. But actually getting feedback on what to do next? Pretty tough.
rokhayakebe 15y ago
There is an artist in everyone. Everyone.
dtran 15y ago
Joe Kraus once said in a talk that companies, especially startups, need to triple down on what they're good at rather than focusing on all their weaknesses - that's really the only way a startup can win since it can't be better than a big company at a lot of things, but it can be head and shoulders better at just one thing. I'm not sure how this applies to people, especially since balanced people can bring a fresh perspective to things (i.e. a programmer with some creative background might approach a problem in new and interesting ways). Without arguing the efficacy of the TigerMom approach, this is indeed why a lot of parents force their kids to do something - you may not have a knack for it at first and be tempted to write off that it just isn't for you, but you need to put in a little more time to really figure out what your true learning curve for something looks like. One interesting question is whether you really love doing something or just love doing it because you had a knack for it initially and picked it up quickly (which results in a positive feedback loop: you spend more time on it and get even better at it compared to the things that you didn't have a knack for at first). I think college really hammered that home for me - before, I just really liked a lot of math of science because it seemed to come naturally, but to find what you really love doing, you have to hit the wall and see if you enjoy it when it becomes a struggle.
rokhayakebe 15y ago
Edit: Imagine what would happen to the industry if you changed titles from software engineers to software artists. I long the day when software engineers start looking at themselves as artists. Take this from someone who isn't an engineer. You take your ideas and turn them into something others can interact with, play with, control, morph, do other freaking cool things with and sometimes they even get a feeling/emotion out of it. That's f&&ing art to me.
- rfrey 15y ago
  That prompts an interesting (to me) idea: software as social commentary. Anyone have any examples of that?
  - Xurinos 15y ago
    Do you mean like online interactive games? I do not know if this is what you were looking for, but I have seen some interesting behaviors arise depending on how the system is set up in Dark Mists. Usually it has to do with where the rewards/incentives lie, such that behavior can be guided towards it, and it is always a new lesson in humility when unexpected incentives appear. Yet in other ways, there is the outside-game community with its rules and ethics. Here is a specific example: Players are concerned about gangs of other players logging in and coordinating because they want to believe they play a game in which the coordination is completely in-character... a sign of the work we have put into the game to focus it on role-playing. When designing an RPG (stress on the role-playing part), I have learned that it is not just about the game mechanics and features. It is also about building the community, the mini-society.
  - minikomi 15y ago
    How about yume nikki (dream diary) A game, but one of the most moving and memorable things I've ever seen come from digital art.
  - TeMPOraL 15y ago
    I also find it interesting. "Software as social commentary" - this single expression gives me a lot of though-food to think about. I think this topic should be explored further. Thanks :). I remember one game that did, by mere coincidence, serve as a social commentary - Volcanic Airlines (http://www.miniclip.com/games/volcanic-airways/en/ http://www.miniclip.com/games/volcanic-airways/en/). I believe was released just after April 2010 eruption of Eyjafjallajökull. It got an interesting reception here in Poland. Not long before, the president of Poland along with many other people died in a plane crash. An official funeral was held, and many heads of states from all around the world announced that they will be arriving to Poland. Many of them later canceled their visits because of the ash cloud. However, the president of Georgia, M. Saakaszwili, arrived late, taking the trip through five different countries to get to the funeral. It made a great impression on people in Poland, and one of the effects was that the video game I mentioned before, the "Volcanic Airlines", was circulating around the polish Internet labeled as "Saakaszwili flies to Poland", or something similar.
juiceandjuice 15y ago
I think there's a good reason why there's often a separation between creatives and technical people, and this is it: In order to be creative, or more specifically "artistic", you have to be comfortable with the irrational. In fact, you truly need to be able to appreciate the irrational. Most technical people I've met (particularly engineers) can't make that jump, and it's not easily taught or learned. By definition, there's often not really a rational way to go about irrationality.
- mattgreenrocks 15y ago
  Good point. Too often on the Internet, irrationalism gets a bad rap, when in reality it is responsible for generating some of the most interesting and profound material. Rationalism is the dogma of the age, and it is firmly entrenched in engineering culture as the way of building systems. It isn't the only component -- we need systems where the designer had a clear vision, and a certain taste that pervades everything. Engineering students should have at least a basic background in aesthetics, because the concepts are important to building systems that have empathy for their users. (Your mother doesn't want to learn Linux, nor should she.) Case in point: Apple (mostly).
- geraldalewis 15y ago
  Most art is most definitely rational, deliberate, and reasoned. It doesn't appear so when you're thrown into the deep end (personally, although I'd been exposed to it countless times, it took me a while to appreciate work like that of Mondrian). Blocks of code look equally irrational to non-coders. All the great Renaissance painters were as obsessed with math as they were pigments. Their art is accessible, so probably appears rational. Modern art is also rational, but understanding why it is rational sometimes means the viewer needs an understanding of its history, or the artist's intentions. Cubism is a great example of this: it might appear irrational for the artist to paint a subject's eyes and their nose on the same plane, but it is not. Cubism is a process in which multiple vantage points are presented at once. Even though it is not a mechanical process dictated by strict rules, it is indeed a process. while i --i subject.angle = random() * 360 # copies a nose, eye, etc. feature = copy( subject.facial_features[ random() * 10 ] ) paint( feature ) Edit: I'm afraid I didn't express myself clearly -- by `rational`, I mean: reasoned, thought out, and deliberate.
erikb 15y ago
It feels like someone could learn some Zen here. Most things in life are not of type boolean. It is true that these labels are a wrong concept in some way. But of course the same applies to the idea, that everybody can do everything in the same quality and quantity, just after spending the same time learning it. It is too simple a point of view, isn't it? Other than that I also get the feeling these days, that you can't be a good coder without any ideas about design. To understand how we construct software we all naturally learn the interface to processors, electronic waves and so on. Why should learning about the human interface not be as important for understanding how we should design our software. Also we all need to express what we have in mind, which also needs some design abilities to create appropriate ppts and prototypes.
tritogeneia 15y ago
I think this is more a matter of transferability. If you're good at one quantitative or technical skill, it's not so hard to learn another, and you can do it pretty quickly. Teaching yourself to become an artist is a bigger gap. I can appreciate design (although I never studied it formally) but I can recognize that it may be more efficient to get someone else to do it for me. The optimal degree of specialization isn't always "none."
aik 15y ago
"What restrictions have others placed on you?" Among other things, I have come to the realization that the way that our schools are structured (in the US anyway) promotes this type of thinking you're talking about. There's a reinforcing feedback loop taking place: 1. You have no natural interest in (say) algebra, possibly due to lack of knowledge about what it is and what it is for. This is never explained to you in a way that makes sense to you. 2. You don't spend time thinking about algebra, and neither does your subconscious. 3. You do your homework, but don't care much, and don't care to learn. Because you don't care, you don't care to understand deeply. You're now stuck learning in a shallow way, or, in other words, memorizing inert knowledge. The knowledge is mostly unusable to you, and the homework and tests are structured in such a way to allow shallow understanding to get by, so you're fine. You mainly care to meet the expectations of the teacher (get a good grade and be viewed favorably), so all is good. 5. Because of the above, you mostly suck at tests, and mostly suck at meeting the teacher's (and peer's) expectations. You suck compared to others in the class. 6. Because you don't fully understand the implications of what you're learning, you continue not to care. Because you are sucking, you care even less. 7. See #1 with the same or other topics. I'd recommend reading about Carol Dweck's Entity vs. Incremental Self-Theories on Learning. Incredible stuff. "The amount of skill that you have in a certain area is proportional to the amount of work that you put into it." Instead of using the word "work", I would say "proportional to the amount of time you and your mind spends on it." One reason people are significantly and seemingly naturally better at certain skills is because they are naturally drawn to it. Things you are naturally drawn to you both consciously AND subconsciously spend time on. In the past I've never spent much time contemplating or trying to understand the intricacies of the stock market, and neither has my mind, and I have never had much interest, and so I'm not a particularly skilled stock broker.
- fastfinner 15y ago
  I couldn't agree more.
- Revisor 15y ago
  I second the recommendation of Mrs. Dweck's texts. Her book "Self-Theories..." changed my life. Or at least reinforced the changes I was undergoing then: The right strategy and appropriate effort are much more important than results.
dasil003 15y ago
The irony of the supposed dichotomy of creative/technical is that both art and programming are incredibly creative fields where one must synthesize with very limited constraints. It is very difficult to excel at either without passion and dedication.
memset 15y ago
To me, this is consistent with Paul Graham's essay "Keep Your Identity Small." If I have strongly identified myself as a "technical person" then I have excluded myself from the possibility of becoming conversant in non-tech things, like good graphic design. Because I'm just a techie! Then this got me thinking about footnote #2 in the essay - that perhaps it is a net win to call oneself a scientist, which implies that one is not committed to any belief in particular. I was pretty pleased when I read this; "great, I'm a scientist, I must be pretty open-minded!" Easy. Except that - and this article seems to highlight the point - if you box yourself into being a "scientist" (I will suggest that many of us techies consider ourselves scientists, or at least science-minded) then you run the risk of excluding yourself from non-science things. Things like graphic design. (or marketing, accounting, or musicianship.) So. I am not a scientist! Not a techie. Not a designer. I am a person who is pretty (darn) good at technology and still has a lot of difficult things, like graphic design, to practice and get better at!
- mattgreenrocks 15y ago
  The problem is some titles, such as scientist or engineer, are used to reinforce group identity at some level. And that group identity then starts to push on the self.
- robrenaud 15y ago
  This is interesting, but I disagree. It's certainly possible to be able to engage in rational discussion about things related to ones own identity. I am a programmer, and primarily I identify as a C++ and Python programmer. Compared to other languages, for a given problem (unless it's truly massive, where the efficiency/expressiveness gain over the other two is large to offset becoming an expert in it), I am almost certainly going to provide an adequate solution quickest in one of those languages. But if you say that Python is slow, doesn't do concurrency well, or has trouble scaling to truly large, 100+ programmer codebases, I'll agree with you. And if you call C++ a large, ugly, language with a ton of ways to really screw yourself, and that is tied to a slow edit/compile/debug cycle, I'll agree with you there too. Here perhaps maybe enlarging my identity helped, if I was just a Python programmer, I wouldn't see how static typing and a really good code searching system would help getting an anchor on a large, complicated C++ code base. Those static types and non-virtual functions means that yes, I can see every place that this particular function is called in our entire code base without having to dig all that much. And if I was just a C++ programmer, I wouldn't know the bliss that is hacking a 200 line program in Python, and solving some mildy complicated but mostly self contained problem in few hour session, all without the bondage of makefiles, compiles, static typing and seg faults.
cek 15y ago
I don't disagree regarding the dichotomy between Technical/Creative per the article. I also subscribe to Heinlein's "Specialization is for Insects" truism (below). However, one of the best pieces of advice I ever got from one of my favorite mentors (Bob Muglia) was to never take a job where you have to do something you know you are not good at. I have always sucked at detailed-status-list tracking. I eventually figured out how to compliment myself with others who could do it. However, at one point in my career when I was looking at new opportunities I saw one that would have forced me to get good a being very detail oriented. When I showed Bob my potential job options and asked for his advice he told me "Don't take the detail job. You will suck at it and you will hate it. You have other super-powers that are valuable and you should focus on finding jobs where you can apply those." You CAN do anything, and you SHOULD try everything. But in the end, you'll be most successful if you focus on what you know you are great at. ----- "A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects". -Robert A. Heinlein
aero142 15y ago
I got caught up in that sort of identity thinking about the time I was getting out of high school but thankfully realized how wrong it was a few years ago. I think that was probably one of the damaging ideas that ever got in my brain. I'm not sure how much natural talent there is for various skills but I do know that believing in natural talent is harmful.
- orangecat 15y ago
  I'm not sure how much natural talent there is for various skills but I do know that believing in natural talent is harmful. That sounds like the argument that you should believe in God because religious people are happier. I don't see why the truth is harmful: you can get better at just about anything with practice, and the degree to which that happens varies with the individual and activity.
unwantedLetters 15y ago
From Less Wrong: http://lesswrong.com/lw/5a9/learned_blankness/ http://lesswrong.com/lw/5a9/learned_blankness/
dkarl 15y ago
The amount of skill that you have in a certain area is proportional to the amount of work that you put into it.... This realization changed my life. Heh, this realization does change your life... very, very slowly. Catching up on all those hours invested is hard. Making them pass pleasantly is also a challenge. Spending all day and half the night doing something is easy when it's a source of pride and your refuge from all the stuff you aren't good at. I spent years aspiring to be good at music. I took piano lessons for years as a kid, even after my parents told me I could stop. I played saxophone in junior high orchestra band and junior high jazz band. I wised up in high school, but then in college I wasted a few hundred bucks on a guitar. I sold it after a month, but then later I started going to the music building several times a week to play the Hanon piano exercises. I actually kept it up for several months before I stopped. No real music, just Hanon. Music was a waste of time for me because I absolutely hated it. There was the generic pleasure of improving at a skill, but that was the sum total of the pleasure I derived from it. My entire goal in learning music, from the time I was a child until I wasted that fifty or so hours in college, was to play music that I liked hearing and that other people would like hearing. Of course, I was so far from that.... I remember as a child being conscious that my older sister's playing bugged the crap out of me. The mistakes, the awkward tempos. And she was much better than me, five years ahead and also better for her age than I was. The entire payoff for playing music was always years away, even assuming I suddenly became extremely dedicated. Every hour between me and my goal would be me enduring the misery of producing noises that I disliked and was ashamed of. I thought that was just the way it was. I flagellated myself for not being disciplined and far-sighted enough to pursue that distant dream like so many other people did. I knew some kids just enjoyed making bad music, but I didn't think they were the ones who would be good at music someday. I just thought they had horrible taste. The ones who were actually good had clearly been tougher than me; they had fought through all the shame and humiliation of playing badly. They were fierce and ruthless with themselves, and finally, after thousands of hours of hardship, they were able to enjoy the fruits of their labor. Nowadays I know that's not how it works. I'm more realistic with myself. I could be a great dancer before I'm forty, except that I don't really like dancing. I could be decent at drawing, except that I don't really like to draw. Every couple of weeks I get a great idea for a cartoon and wish I could draw it, but I really don't want to sketch crummy cartoons every day so I'll be ready when I get a good idea. Programming, though.... Fire up gdb and look at a core dump? Why the heck not? Install a new library and play around with it? Fun! Read through some code, figure out how it works, and be on the lookout for a memory leak? Ooh, kind of exciting, I might be the one who finds it. Those aren't especially stimulating activities, and there's no glamor in them. They're nothing I could brag about to my friends or show off to a cute girl. (I'm working on HTML and CSS now to fix that :-P) They're just something I usually don't mind doing and often find pleasurable. I never chose to be good at programming, and I actually took a pretty snobbish and dismissive attitude towards it until I found myself making a living at it. (Looking down on it was probably what enabled me to believe I could be good at it. Pfft, I can do this, any idiot can do this, especially if he's half-autistic like me.) I still get off on stupid tangents, though. I took a vacation several years ago and was extremely frustrated with the performance of my point-and-click digital camera. I ended up buying a DSLR, and suddenly I felt the pressure. I had to become a good photographer. My friends were taking pictures and putting them on Flickr (now on Facebook) and I had to keep up. I couldn't suck at taking pictures. Especially not after I bought the DSLR. I bought a crapload of books and read at least a third of the ones I bought. I read on the web. I took classes. I took my camera with me to places and took pictures instead of having fun. The fact that I was taking shitty photos became a huge monkey on my back. Still is, kind of. Last fall, I took an amazing trip to a place I'd been wanting to go to for years, and I obsessed over the quality of the pictures. When I got back I immediately looked through them and couldn't find a single one I liked. For weeks I procrastinated processing them. Finally I did. They sucked. It was awful. Now I don't even know if I should take my camera with me on the next vacation I take. So please, let me indulge in the misconception that I am just a "technical type." That way I can take pictures in peace, without knowing that it is really my fault and my shame if they suck, and that I should be putting in the hard work so that one day I will be competent and my friends will not have to endure my shitty photos. No, my shitty photos are not my fault. I am just not a creative type. I am a techie. Leave me alone and stop reminding me that all my artistic deficiencies are just one big character flaw!
robobenjie 15y ago
I recommend pointing people to this excellent comic: http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=1995#comic http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=1995#c...
monological 15y ago
Case in point: shawn inman
happyfeet 15y ago
One article in today's blog of 37signals.com/svn resonates very much with the message. http://37signals.com/svn/posts/2919-ten-design-lessons-from-frederick-law-olmsted-the-father-of-american-landscape-architecture#extended http://37signals.com/svn/posts/2919-ten-design-lessons-from-... Here is an excerpt: ================= Olmsted had no formal design training and didn’t commit to landscape architecture until he was 44. Before that, he was a New York Times correspondent to the Confederate states, the manager of a California gold mine, and General Secretary of the United States Sanitary Commission during the Civil War. He also ran a farm on Staten Island from 1848 to 1855 and spent time working in a New York dry-goods store. His views on landscapes developed from travelling and reading. When he was young, he took a year-long voyage in China. And in 1850, he took a six-month walking tour of Europe and the British Isles, during which he saw numerous parks, private estates, and scenic countryside. He was also deeply influenced by Swiss physician Johann Georg von Zimmermann’s writings about nature’s ability to heal “derangements of the mind” through imagination. Olmsted read Zimmermann’s book as a boy and treasured it. =======================
sayemm 15y ago
Hackers and Painters is a good answer to this. Is the person who wrote that a "technical person"?
udoprog 15y ago
people need to stop attaching themselves to what they do, this way its easier to both have fun just doing, no matter skill level or adherence. I've seen bizarre cases of very skilled people tearing themselves up just because whatever they do is not perfect in any given respect, be it technical or artful. They end up miserable. I don't design. I could, but I know that the time I would spend designing would be twice the amount compared to a skilled designer. Instead I ask someone who loves design. collaborate with them to create something awesome. We bash and we chastise, but always realize that its about the work, not the person or his/her skill level. This does not translate well to corporate, but for the better it really should.
j_baker 15y ago
What restrictions have others placed on you? This is what happens when you identify with your chosen profession too closely. Psychologists refer to it as a persona: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persona_(psychology) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persona_(psychology) It's tempting to believe that others have placed these kinds of restrictions on you, but the truth of the matter is that we put these restrictions on ourselves. That's the truly important discovery: you have control over the mask you wear (albeit not unlimited control).
fbnt 15y ago
"I make sofware, it's one of the few art forms that really pays off nowadays" This is my usual line when somebody ask me what I do for a living. Still, I can see in many people's eyes (especially girls) a spark of prejudice: ( IT Guy = pragmatic, heartless, frustrated, framed boring nerd )
gaustin 15y ago
I've recently taken up hobby blacksmithing (focusing on blades). The skills required were completely alien to me at first. At this point, I can hardly make nails. But stretching myself in such a dramatic way has really fueled my creativity, even when it comes to developing software. No matter how much I struggle, I know that in 20 years of systematically pounding away on evenings and weekends, I'll have enough skill to make some good stuff. I'm confident that I can become a ABS Journeyman, and perhaps a Master if I live long enough.
Sukotto 15y ago
I'm reminded of the wonderful (sadly now defunct) web comic "The Life of Riley" in which this is a major, ongoing plot arc. Starting here: http://www.pyrocam.com/life-of-riley/comic.php?strip=25 http://www.pyrocam.com/life-of-riley/comic.php?strip=25 and continuing throughout the entire 600+ comics of the series. That particular plot arc follows Dan, the artist, who unlocks his technical side, eventually ascending to demigodhood by learning to leverage both types of creation. If you want an amusing distraction, it's worth a read. (Also interesting to see references to some of the other major web comics of the day... many of which are now long gone.)

195 points by johnfn 15y ago

niccl 15y ago

This article perpetuates a dichotomy that I have only just (at 50+) realised is false: creative versus technical. Technical people create: software and hardware often come out of nothing more than an idea. The real dichotomy that this article is getting at might be effectively described as artistic versus non-artistic, but even that is not a complete description of the distinction. Maybe it comes down to the old left-brain/right-brain thing? I used to call myself non-creative, until several good friends united to point out that I do create things, just not things that you could plausibly turn up in art galleries.

DrHankPym 15y ago
Really? I thought it was about building skills by just applying yourself. You don't learn guitar or Ruby in a night. You practice and play with them for years and integrate them into your projects.
- juiceandjuice 15y ago
  Knowing how to play guitar like a virtuoso != being artistic. Head on down to Guitar Center to see what I mean.
  - Hawramani 15y ago
    I agree. If I made a robot that could follow musical notes and play the guitar perfectly, would anyone describe its playing the guitar as 'creative'? I hope not. This is a lab-like situation where we can know for sure that the robot is using zero creativity to play the guitar. It is just following instructions, it is not creating anything new. However, if the robot could create new algorithms on the fly and could use them to tweak the way it played the guitar for the better, then we could say it is a creative robot. Creative guitar players, like the second robot, invent new ways of playing a particular piece of music, or just a few seconds of it, to induce specific reactions in the listeners. This is creativity, and it seems to be rare not common, possibly because of how difficult it is to master the notes, and then to build rapport with the audience and manipulate their emotions.
    - geekzgalore 15y ago
      Exactly my thoughts.
    - geekzgalore 15y ago
      Learning something is not a creative process, but finding better ways at doing it (after learning) makes you an artist. Same rule applies to learning following skills: - Music - A programming language - Cooking
  - gallerytungsten 15y ago
    "Shredding" alone isn't virtuosity.
ChuckMcM 15y ago
I suffer from Artism as well :-) Which is to say as an engineer I solve problems with materials at hand in ways that meet constraints. That often requires creative thinking but the creative act is appreciated by other engineers more than lay people. I think of it as the ability to see the unseen. A very non-crisp way of describing the ability to see a solution amongst a pile of symptoms or pain points. A sculptor sees the figure 'inside' the stone, an engineer sees the solution 'amongst' the available resources. Now if I could reliably interview for it I'd be all set :-)
Hawramani 15y ago
We need to reach a definition of creativity before we can have any discussion about whether an activity is creative or not. A good definition I found somewhere is that creativity is the ability to create solutions for a problem, any kind of problem. A lot of creativity (if not all creativity) is the ability to assemble large objects from smaller ones, such as writing symphonies, designing a motorcycle engine, or building a computer program. Creativity is the ability to create new things. It is the ability to hear 100 jokes and make a really funny new joke, or to bring a number of words and use them in a new manner to create a creative poem. I find absolutely nothing inherently creative in a person's ability to follow musical notes and thus play the violin. The same goes for painting, and any number of other 'creative' professions. But to excel at these fields creativity seems to be necessary. Writing a novel without creativity will only produce a dull one that nobody wants to read, and the reviewers will say 'there is nothing new in it', because the author hasn't used creativity to produce new material. Programming is one of the most creative professions, it is hard to think of a better example of a creative profession, because programming is problem solving, which is creativity. Bad programmers either lack the skill and experience to build solutions, or are simply not creative enough to do it. A person's creativity is limited by their ability to hold complex problems in their brains, and different people seem to have different capacities of this brain 'RAM'. After loading a complex problem into our heads, we then need skill to manipulate the objects to make something beautiful out of them, and this ability can be severely limited by the lack of knowledge of the field. It will be hard to create elegant mathematical solutions to programming problems without some knowledge of math.
johnfn 15y ago
My article actually intended to do the opposite - to argue that there is no dichotomy at all. I'm interested how you got the opposite impression. Maybe I should go back and edit some more. :)

UrLicht 15y ago

While I agree with the conclusion that you only get out of something what you put in, a quick review of the history of genius will reveal several characters that did have an innate talent that was indeed cultivated through hard work, but was not learned "from scratch". You may, in fact, be the artistic type, and glean from that a certain advantage over someone who is not.

marcusestes 15y ago

If your blog is actually served up in production by Github, yeah, you're a technical person.

Miky 15y ago
It seems that you didn't actually read the post. Your comment is only in response to the title, and it's actually a good example of what the post was trying to combat.
- mattgreenrocks 15y ago
  Additionally, these sorts of clever one-liners are what HN comments shouldn't be about.
- marcusestes 15y ago
  I read the post, I just wanted to publicly appreciate the (frankly, creative) way that the blog was being hosted. Sometimes it feels like the Hacker News community wants to "place restrictions" on expressions of humor.

radagaisus 15y ago

We should act and do as though there are no limits to what we can do, but we have to remember that nature & nurture do impose boundaries. We just don't know what those boundaries are.

ricefield 15y ago

This is very interesting to me, as a computer science student, who does "techie" things like code a take a lot of technical classes, yet always been considered (or considered myself) a "artistic" person. When I was younger, my best subjects were Art and English, and my worst subject was always Math. This had continued to be true, as I consider myself much better at design than at coding or problem solving. I wouldn't say the dichotomy is necessarily true or false - I hate to think we are stuck as one or the other, and I certainly know people who are talented at both. On the other hand, in my observation, there always seems to be an inherent aptitude - I struggle and work a lot harder with "technical" things; but it can be overcome - I am still a CS student at top university, and am not a phenomenal coder, but I can keep up. For so-called "technical" people, you may or may not believe in the dichotomy, but that doesn't mean hard work can't make you better at "creative" work than "talented" others.

idan 15y ago

As a developer/designer, I spend a lot of time getting this _exact_ message across to developers who "don't do design" and designers who are afraid of code. I've given that same schpiel many times before -- in almost the exact same words ("false dichotomy", "labels", "we can be skilled at anything we dedicate ourselves to"). Can't upvote this enough.

archgoon 15y ago
Can you recommend any books (or projects) that would be good references for learning design?
- juiceandjuice 15y ago
  Personally, I don't think you can learn design without appreciating it first. A good place to start is to study Bauhaus. There's tons and tons of books on Bauhaus. It's ridiculous how influential Bauhaus was on everything in western culture.
- gallerytungsten 15y ago
  What kind of design do you want to learn? If you're just starting out, you have to break it down a bit into some of the component parts. Typography, composition, color. Print design is different than web design. 3d design is another thing entirely; and so on. Let's say the goal is print design. Get hold of a layout program, such as Quark, InDesign, or Illustrator. Start by doing basic things like business cards and letterhead. Work on just the type first. Use only 1 font at first; then different weights of the same typeface. Then start trying to add in drawn elements or even just geometric shapes. Remember: if it doesn't work in black & white, it won't work in color. When you are ready for color, keep in mind that the 3 strongest colors in design are black, white, and red. Black and red are the easier of the three; so put extra attention into the use of white (negative space).
  - usaar333 15y ago
    Unfortunately, you've really jumped the gun here. I'm a programmer who isn't so hot with design. But I certainly know how to use a program to layout objects; that's trivial to learn on the grand scheme of things. What I (and other non-designing devs) don't get is how to know what "doesn't work". I have at most a fuzzy idea of what are considered good and bad designs, much less how to produce them. One of the biggest issues is the lack of feedback. With beginning programming, you are getting constant feedback from the computer. It even tells you where you are going wrong (line numbers, variables, etc.) Design lacks such an objective feedback system. Sure, there's the times when your friends will agree that iteration B is superior to A. But actually getting feedback on what to do next? Pretty tough.

rokhayakebe 15y ago

There is an artist in everyone. Everyone.

dtran 15y ago

Joe Kraus once said in a talk that companies, especially startups, need to triple down on what they're good at rather than focusing on all their weaknesses - that's really the only way a startup can win since it can't be better than a big company at a lot of things, but it can be head and shoulders better at just one thing. I'm not sure how this applies to people, especially since balanced people can bring a fresh perspective to things (i.e. a programmer with some creative background might approach a problem in new and interesting ways). Without arguing the efficacy of the TigerMom approach, this is indeed why a lot of parents force their kids to do something - you may not have a knack for it at first and be tempted to write off that it just isn't for you, but you need to put in a little more time to really figure out what your true learning curve for something looks like. One interesting question is whether you really love doing something or just love doing it because you had a knack for it initially and picked it up quickly (which results in a positive feedback loop: you spend more time on it and get even better at it compared to the things that you didn't have a knack for at first). I think college really hammered that home for me - before, I just really liked a lot of math of science because it seemed to come naturally, but to find what you really love doing, you have to hit the wall and see if you enjoy it when it becomes a struggle.

rokhayakebe 15y ago

Edit: Imagine what would happen to the industry if you changed titles from software engineers to software artists. I long the day when software engineers start looking at themselves as artists. Take this from someone who isn't an engineer. You take your ideas and turn them into something others can interact with, play with, control, morph, do other freaking cool things with and sometimes they even get a feeling/emotion out of it. That's f&&ing art to me.

rfrey 15y ago
That prompts an interesting (to me) idea: software as social commentary. Anyone have any examples of that?
- Xurinos 15y ago
  Do you mean like online interactive games? I do not know if this is what you were looking for, but I have seen some interesting behaviors arise depending on how the system is set up in Dark Mists. Usually it has to do with where the rewards/incentives lie, such that behavior can be guided towards it, and it is always a new lesson in humility when unexpected incentives appear. Yet in other ways, there is the outside-game community with its rules and ethics. Here is a specific example: Players are concerned about gangs of other players logging in and coordinating because they want to believe they play a game in which the coordination is completely in-character... a sign of the work we have put into the game to focus it on role-playing. When designing an RPG (stress on the role-playing part), I have learned that it is not just about the game mechanics and features. It is also about building the community, the mini-society.
- minikomi 15y ago
  How about yume nikki (dream diary) A game, but one of the most moving and memorable things I've ever seen come from digital art.
- TeMPOraL 15y ago
  I also find it interesting. "Software as social commentary" - this single expression gives me a lot of though-food to think about. I think this topic should be explored further. Thanks :). I remember one game that did, by mere coincidence, serve as a social commentary - Volcanic Airlines (http://www.miniclip.com/games/volcanic-airways/en/ http://www.miniclip.com/games/volcanic-airways/en/). I believe was released just after April 2010 eruption of Eyjafjallajökull. It got an interesting reception here in Poland. Not long before, the president of Poland along with many other people died in a plane crash. An official funeral was held, and many heads of states from all around the world announced that they will be arriving to Poland. Many of them later canceled their visits because of the ash cloud. However, the president of Georgia, M. Saakaszwili, arrived late, taking the trip through five different countries to get to the funeral. It made a great impression on people in Poland, and one of the effects was that the video game I mentioned before, the "Volcanic Airlines", was circulating around the polish Internet labeled as "Saakaszwili flies to Poland", or something similar.

juiceandjuice 15y ago

I think there's a good reason why there's often a separation between creatives and technical people, and this is it: In order to be creative, or more specifically "artistic", you have to be comfortable with the irrational. In fact, you truly need to be able to appreciate the irrational. Most technical people I've met (particularly engineers) can't make that jump, and it's not easily taught or learned. By definition, there's often not really a rational way to go about irrationality.

mattgreenrocks 15y ago
Good point. Too often on the Internet, irrationalism gets a bad rap, when in reality it is responsible for generating some of the most interesting and profound material. Rationalism is the dogma of the age, and it is firmly entrenched in engineering culture as the way of building systems. It isn't the only component -- we need systems where the designer had a clear vision, and a certain taste that pervades everything. Engineering students should have at least a basic background in aesthetics, because the concepts are important to building systems that have empathy for their users. (Your mother doesn't want to learn Linux, nor should she.) Case in point: Apple (mostly).
geraldalewis 15y ago
Most art is most definitely rational, deliberate, and reasoned. It doesn't appear so when you're thrown into the deep end (personally, although I'd been exposed to it countless times, it took me a while to appreciate work like that of Mondrian). Blocks of code look equally irrational to non-coders. All the great Renaissance painters were as obsessed with math as they were pigments. Their art is accessible, so probably appears rational. Modern art is also rational, but understanding why it is rational sometimes means the viewer needs an understanding of its history, or the artist's intentions. Cubism is a great example of this: it might appear irrational for the artist to paint a subject's eyes and their nose on the same plane, but it is not. Cubism is a process in which multiple vantage points are presented at once. Even though it is not a mechanical process dictated by strict rules, it is indeed a process. while i --i subject.angle = random() * 360 # copies a nose, eye, etc. feature = copy( subject.facial_features[ random() * 10 ] ) paint( feature ) Edit: I'm afraid I didn't express myself clearly -- by `rational`, I mean: reasoned, thought out, and deliberate.

erikb 15y ago

It feels like someone could learn some Zen here. Most things in life are not of type boolean. It is true that these labels are a wrong concept in some way. But of course the same applies to the idea, that everybody can do everything in the same quality and quantity, just after spending the same time learning it. It is too simple a point of view, isn't it? Other than that I also get the feeling these days, that you can't be a good coder without any ideas about design. To understand how we construct software we all naturally learn the interface to processors, electronic waves and so on. Why should learning about the human interface not be as important for understanding how we should design our software. Also we all need to express what we have in mind, which also needs some design abilities to create appropriate ppts and prototypes.

tritogeneia 15y ago

I think this is more a matter of transferability. If you're good at one quantitative or technical skill, it's not so hard to learn another, and you can do it pretty quickly. Teaching yourself to become an artist is a bigger gap. I can appreciate design (although I never studied it formally) but I can recognize that it may be more efficient to get someone else to do it for me. The optimal degree of specialization isn't always "none."

aik 15y ago

"What restrictions have others placed on you?" Among other things, I have come to the realization that the way that our schools are structured (in the US anyway) promotes this type of thinking you're talking about. There's a reinforcing feedback loop taking place: 1. You have no natural interest in (say) algebra, possibly due to lack of knowledge about what it is and what it is for. This is never explained to you in a way that makes sense to you. 2. You don't spend time thinking about algebra, and neither does your subconscious. 3. You do your homework, but don't care much, and don't care to learn. Because you don't care, you don't care to understand deeply. You're now stuck learning in a shallow way, or, in other words, memorizing inert knowledge. The knowledge is mostly unusable to you, and the homework and tests are structured in such a way to allow shallow understanding to get by, so you're fine. You mainly care to meet the expectations of the teacher (get a good grade and be viewed favorably), so all is good. 5. Because of the above, you mostly suck at tests, and mostly suck at meeting the teacher's (and peer's) expectations. You suck compared to others in the class. 6. Because you don't fully understand the implications of what you're learning, you continue not to care. Because you are sucking, you care even less. 7. See #1 with the same or other topics. I'd recommend reading about Carol Dweck's Entity vs. Incremental Self-Theories on Learning. Incredible stuff. "The amount of skill that you have in a certain area is proportional to the amount of work that you put into it." Instead of using the word "work", I would say "proportional to the amount of time you and your mind spends on it." One reason people are significantly and seemingly naturally better at certain skills is because they are naturally drawn to it. Things you are naturally drawn to you both consciously AND subconsciously spend time on. In the past I've never spent much time contemplating or trying to understand the intricacies of the stock market, and neither has my mind, and I have never had much interest, and so I'm not a particularly skilled stock broker.

fastfinner 15y ago
I couldn't agree more.
Revisor 15y ago
I second the recommendation of Mrs. Dweck's texts. Her book "Self-Theories..." changed my life. Or at least reinforced the changes I was undergoing then: The right strategy and appropriate effort are much more important than results.

dasil003 15y ago

The irony of the supposed dichotomy of creative/technical is that both art and programming are incredibly creative fields where one must synthesize with very limited constraints. It is very difficult to excel at either without passion and dedication.

memset 15y ago

To me, this is consistent with Paul Graham's essay "Keep Your Identity Small." If I have strongly identified myself as a "technical person" then I have excluded myself from the possibility of becoming conversant in non-tech things, like good graphic design. Because I'm just a techie! Then this got me thinking about footnote #2 in the essay - that perhaps it is a net win to call oneself a scientist, which implies that one is not committed to any belief in particular. I was pretty pleased when I read this; "great, I'm a scientist, I must be pretty open-minded!" Easy. Except that - and this article seems to highlight the point - if you box yourself into being a "scientist" (I will suggest that many of us techies consider ourselves scientists, or at least science-minded) then you run the risk of excluding yourself from non-science things. Things like graphic design. (or marketing, accounting, or musicianship.) So. I am not a scientist! Not a techie. Not a designer. I am a person who is pretty (darn) good at technology and still has a lot of difficult things, like graphic design, to practice and get better at!

mattgreenrocks 15y ago
The problem is some titles, such as scientist or engineer, are used to reinforce group identity at some level. And that group identity then starts to push on the self.
robrenaud 15y ago
This is interesting, but I disagree. It's certainly possible to be able to engage in rational discussion about things related to ones own identity. I am a programmer, and primarily I identify as a C++ and Python programmer. Compared to other languages, for a given problem (unless it's truly massive, where the efficiency/expressiveness gain over the other two is large to offset becoming an expert in it), I am almost certainly going to provide an adequate solution quickest in one of those languages. But if you say that Python is slow, doesn't do concurrency well, or has trouble scaling to truly large, 100+ programmer codebases, I'll agree with you. And if you call C++ a large, ugly, language with a ton of ways to really screw yourself, and that is tied to a slow edit/compile/debug cycle, I'll agree with you there too. Here perhaps maybe enlarging my identity helped, if I was just a Python programmer, I wouldn't see how static typing and a really good code searching system would help getting an anchor on a large, complicated C++ code base. Those static types and non-virtual functions means that yes, I can see every place that this particular function is called in our entire code base without having to dig all that much. And if I was just a C++ programmer, I wouldn't know the bliss that is hacking a 200 line program in Python, and solving some mildy complicated but mostly self contained problem in few hour session, all without the bondage of makefiles, compiles, static typing and seg faults.

cek 15y ago

I don't disagree regarding the dichotomy between Technical/Creative per the article. I also subscribe to Heinlein's "Specialization is for Insects" truism (below). However, one of the best pieces of advice I ever got from one of my favorite mentors (Bob Muglia) was to never take a job where you have to do something you know you are not good at. I have always sucked at detailed-status-list tracking. I eventually figured out how to compliment myself with others who could do it. However, at one point in my career when I was looking at new opportunities I saw one that would have forced me to get good a being very detail oriented. When I showed Bob my potential job options and asked for his advice he told me "Don't take the detail job. You will suck at it and you will hate it. You have other super-powers that are valuable and you should focus on finding jobs where you can apply those." You CAN do anything, and you SHOULD try everything. But in the end, you'll be most successful if you focus on what you know you are great at. ----- "A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects". -Robert A. Heinlein

aero142 15y ago

I got caught up in that sort of identity thinking about the time I was getting out of high school but thankfully realized how wrong it was a few years ago. I think that was probably one of the damaging ideas that ever got in my brain. I'm not sure how much natural talent there is for various skills but I do know that believing in natural talent is harmful.

orangecat 15y ago
I'm not sure how much natural talent there is for various skills but I do know that believing in natural talent is harmful. That sounds like the argument that you should believe in God because religious people are happier. I don't see why the truth is harmful: you can get better at just about anything with practice, and the degree to which that happens varies with the individual and activity.

unwantedLetters 15y ago

From Less Wrong: http://lesswrong.com/lw/5a9/learned_blankness/ http://lesswrong.com/lw/5a9/learned_blankness/

dkarl 15y ago

The amount of skill that you have in a certain area is proportional to the amount of work that you put into it.... This realization changed my life. Heh, this realization does change your life... very, very slowly. Catching up on all those hours invested is hard. Making them pass pleasantly is also a challenge. Spending all day and half the night doing something is easy when it's a source of pride and your refuge from all the stuff you aren't good at. I spent years aspiring to be good at music. I took piano lessons for years as a kid, even after my parents told me I could stop. I played saxophone in junior high orchestra band and junior high jazz band. I wised up in high school, but then in college I wasted a few hundred bucks on a guitar. I sold it after a month, but then later I started going to the music building several times a week to play the Hanon piano exercises. I actually kept it up for several months before I stopped. No real music, just Hanon. Music was a waste of time for me because I absolutely hated it. There was the generic pleasure of improving at a skill, but that was the sum total of the pleasure I derived from it. My entire goal in learning music, from the time I was a child until I wasted that fifty or so hours in college, was to play music that I liked hearing and that other people would like hearing. Of course, I was so far from that.... I remember as a child being conscious that my older sister's playing bugged the crap out of me. The mistakes, the awkward tempos. And she was much better than me, five years ahead and also better for her age than I was. The entire payoff for playing music was always years away, even assuming I suddenly became extremely dedicated. Every hour between me and my goal would be me enduring the misery of producing noises that I disliked and was ashamed of. I thought that was just the way it was. I flagellated myself for not being disciplined and far-sighted enough to pursue that distant dream like so many other people did. I knew some kids just enjoyed making bad music, but I didn't think they were the ones who would be good at music someday. I just thought they had horrible taste. The ones who were actually good had clearly been tougher than me; they had fought through all the shame and humiliation of playing badly. They were fierce and ruthless with themselves, and finally, after thousands of hours of hardship, they were able to enjoy the fruits of their labor. Nowadays I know that's not how it works. I'm more realistic with myself. I could be a great dancer before I'm forty, except that I don't really like dancing. I could be decent at drawing, except that I don't really like to draw. Every couple of weeks I get a great idea for a cartoon and wish I could draw it, but I really don't want to sketch crummy cartoons every day so I'll be ready when I get a good idea. Programming, though.... Fire up gdb and look at a core dump? Why the heck not? Install a new library and play around with it? Fun! Read through some code, figure out how it works, and be on the lookout for a memory leak? Ooh, kind of exciting, I might be the one who finds it. Those aren't especially stimulating activities, and there's no glamor in them. They're nothing I could brag about to my friends or show off to a cute girl. (I'm working on HTML and CSS now to fix that :-P) They're just something I usually don't mind doing and often find pleasurable. I never chose to be good at programming, and I actually took a pretty snobbish and dismissive attitude towards it until I found myself making a living at it. (Looking down on it was probably what enabled me to believe I could be good at it. Pfft, I can do this, any idiot can do this, especially if he's half-autistic like me.) I still get off on stupid tangents, though. I took a vacation several years ago and was extremely frustrated with the performance of my point-and-click digital camera. I ended up buying a DSLR, and suddenly I felt the pressure. I had to become a good photographer. My friends were taking pictures and putting them on Flickr (now on Facebook) and I had to keep up. I couldn't suck at taking pictures. Especially not after I bought the DSLR. I bought a crapload of books and read at least a third of the ones I bought. I read on the web. I took classes. I took my camera with me to places and took pictures instead of having fun. The fact that I was taking shitty photos became a huge monkey on my back. Still is, kind of. Last fall, I took an amazing trip to a place I'd been wanting to go to for years, and I obsessed over the quality of the pictures. When I got back I immediately looked through them and couldn't find a single one I liked. For weeks I procrastinated processing them. Finally I did. They sucked. It was awful. Now I don't even know if I should take my camera with me on the next vacation I take. So please, let me indulge in the misconception that I am just a "technical type." That way I can take pictures in peace, without knowing that it is really my fault and my shame if they suck, and that I should be putting in the hard work so that one day I will be competent and my friends will not have to endure my shitty photos. No, my shitty photos are not my fault. I am just not a creative type. I am a techie. Leave me alone and stop reminding me that all my artistic deficiencies are just one big character flaw!

robobenjie 15y ago

I recommend pointing people to this excellent comic: http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=1995#comic http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=1995#c...

monological 15y ago

Case in point: shawn inman

happyfeet 15y ago

One article in today's blog of 37signals.com/svn resonates very much with the message. http://37signals.com/svn/posts/2919-ten-design-lessons-from-frederick-law-olmsted-the-father-of-american-landscape-architecture#extended http://37signals.com/svn/posts/2919-ten-design-lessons-from-... Here is an excerpt: ================= Olmsted had no formal design training and didn’t commit to landscape architecture until he was 44. Before that, he was a New York Times correspondent to the Confederate states, the manager of a California gold mine, and General Secretary of the United States Sanitary Commission during the Civil War. He also ran a farm on Staten Island from 1848 to 1855 and spent time working in a New York dry-goods store. His views on landscapes developed from travelling and reading. When he was young, he took a year-long voyage in China. And in 1850, he took a six-month walking tour of Europe and the British Isles, during which he saw numerous parks, private estates, and scenic countryside. He was also deeply influenced by Swiss physician Johann Georg von Zimmermann’s writings about nature’s ability to heal “derangements of the mind” through imagination. Olmsted read Zimmermann’s book as a boy and treasured it. =======================

sayemm 15y ago

Hackers and Painters is a good answer to this. Is the person who wrote that a "technical person"?

udoprog 15y ago

people need to stop attaching themselves to what they do, this way its easier to both have fun just doing, no matter skill level or adherence. I've seen bizarre cases of very skilled people tearing themselves up just because whatever they do is not perfect in any given respect, be it technical or artful. They end up miserable. I don't design. I could, but I know that the time I would spend designing would be twice the amount compared to a skilled designer. Instead I ask someone who loves design. collaborate with them to create something awesome. We bash and we chastise, but always realize that its about the work, not the person or his/her skill level. This does not translate well to corporate, but for the better it really should.

j_baker 15y ago

What restrictions have others placed on you? This is what happens when you identify with your chosen profession too closely. Psychologists refer to it as a persona: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persona_(psychology) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persona_(psychology) It's tempting to believe that others have placed these kinds of restrictions on you, but the truth of the matter is that we put these restrictions on ourselves. That's the truly important discovery: you have control over the mask you wear (albeit not unlimited control).

fbnt 15y ago

"I make sofware, it's one of the few art forms that really pays off nowadays" This is my usual line when somebody ask me what I do for a living. Still, I can see in many people's eyes (especially girls) a spark of prejudice: ( IT Guy = pragmatic, heartless, frustrated, framed boring nerd )

gaustin 15y ago

I've recently taken up hobby blacksmithing (focusing on blades). The skills required were completely alien to me at first. At this point, I can hardly make nails. But stretching myself in such a dramatic way has really fueled my creativity, even when it comes to developing software. No matter how much I struggle, I know that in 20 years of systematically pounding away on evenings and weekends, I'll have enough skill to make some good stuff. I'm confident that I can become a ABS Journeyman, and perhaps a Master if I live long enough.

Sukotto 15y ago

I'm reminded of the wonderful (sadly now defunct) web comic "The Life of Riley" in which this is a major, ongoing plot arc. Starting here: http://www.pyrocam.com/life-of-riley/comic.php?strip=25 http://www.pyrocam.com/life-of-riley/comic.php?strip=25 and continuing throughout the entire 600+ comics of the series. That particular plot arc follows Dan, the artist, who unlocks his technical side, eventually ascending to demigodhood by learning to leverage both types of creation. If you want an amusing distraction, it's worth a read. (Also interesting to see references to some of the other major web comics of the day... many of which are now long gone.)