10 ms·

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

• drusepth 5y ago
  OT: does anyone know any groups for making the opposite switch (tech to art)?
  • TrevorJ 5y ago
    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.
    • Fire-Dragon-DoL 5y ago
      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.
  • midiguy 5y ago
    Alcoholics Anonymous
  • twox2 5y ago
    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.
    • secretsatan 5y ago
      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
      • twox2 5y ago
        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.
    • 52-6F-62 5y ago
      I think they mean for artists of conviction.
  • noahbradley 5y ago
    Art is a pretty broad category. Any particular sort of art you're interested in?
  • time_to_smile 5y ago
    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.
    • claudiulodro 5y ago
      > 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?
      • pram 5y ago
        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.
  • 52-6F-62 5y ago
    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.
  • Apocryphon 5y ago
    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.
  • pimlottc 5y ago
    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/ https://grayarea.org/ 1: https://grayareafestival.io/ https://grayareafestival.io/
  • prions 5y ago
    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.
  • egypturnash 5y ago
    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!".
  • adbachman 5y ago
    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.
  • tinycabbage 5y ago
    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.
• robotburrito 5y ago
  One of the best engineers I know is a guy basically in nearly 300,000$ of art history school debt lol.
  • starwind 5y ago
    How? Did he pay for a full-time PhD out-of-pocket?
• amon22 5y ago
  That's kind of depressing
  • silicon2401 5y ago
    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.
    • Apocryphon 5y ago
      Starving artists have been around since time immemorial but it used to be less un-viable in the past.
      • jancsika 5y ago
        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).
    • UnpossibleJim 5y ago
      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".
    • cratermoon 5y ago
      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.
      • thinkharderdev 5y ago
• ramesh31 5y ago
  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.
  • semitones 5y ago
    Are you going to pay them six figures to keep doing art?
    • xboxnolifes 5y ago
      As a good designer, I hope so. I usually feel a good designer is worth way more than that.
      • egypturnash 5y ago
        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?
        • unicornmama 5y ago
          Well the transition would be into UX design.
        • ramesh31 5y ago
          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.
  • murderfs 5y ago
    I too encourage others to sacrifice their well-being for my vague sense of aesthetics.
• zozbot234 5y ago
  The demoscene has plenty of "artists who code", dating back literally decades. https://www.pouet.net 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.
  • bitwize 5y ago
    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.
• ushakov 5y ago
  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?
  • adbachman 5y ago
    > 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.
• mywittyname 5y ago
  > 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.
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  • faitswulff 5y ago
    You should have left off the second sentence, then no one would know whether you were an artist or a coder.
    • mywittyname 5y ago
      The point of my comment was empathy. I too work a basic/easy engineering job to fund my creative pursuits.
  • paskozdilar 5y ago
    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.
• legerdemain 5y ago
  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.
  • stuckinhell 5y ago
    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.
    • legerdemain 5y ago
      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.
      • stuckinhell 5y ago
        Wow I didn't know that. Thanks!
        • legerdemain 5y ago
          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.
• knighthack 5y ago
  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.
  • pibechorro 5y ago
    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.
    • emptysongglass 5y ago
      > 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.
• stuckinhell 5y ago
  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.
  • kritiko 5y ago
    > “it was clear they wanted to do more than just be developers.” This seems like a good problem.
    • stuckinhell 5y ago
      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.