Although I majored in CS, talking a political science course in college made me realize that having some fundamental knowledge of data science, statistics and, in general, effective 'data crunching' habilities (call it numpy, matlab, whatever) is probably pretty useful for empirical sociological/anthropological research. So there's definitely some overlap between your CS skill set and knowledge that might help you in the humanities, I would even say that it gives you some kind of leverage to differentiate from the majority, if you play your cards well.
Have a look at this paper, for example, it really made me think of how interesting it is to ask what implications technological change has in societies: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/american-political-s...
It talks about what consequences the increased cellphone coverage in Africa could have related to acts of political violence.
Ask HN: Any successful transitions from a tech/IT career to working in the arts?
51–60 of 83 posts
Re: Ask HN: Any successful transitions from a tech/IT career to working in the arts?
#52Speaking directly to the literary side of things, there is very little money to be had, and it's easy for little things to eat away what little money that you can make.¹ Looking over my records, my lifetime income from writing literary works is less than $600 and that's with an MFA and a pretty good publication record.
Journalism was a better bet for being able to make a living at before the internet ate the news. Putting aside tech writing contracts, the most I ever got for writing was $1000 for a review article for U&lc back in the 90s. U&lc no longer exists and freelance paychecks haven't really grown since those days either.²
Keith Gessen, in 2006, wrote an article on money for the magazine he co-founded, n+1, which is available here: https://www.nplusonemag.com/issue-4/essays/money/ The only thing that's changed in the intervening 15 years is that the income is lower, the opportunities fewer and the expenses are higher.
Bottom line: it can be a side gig, but not much more than that unless you're extraordinarily lucky.
---
1. Thanks to the pernicious impact of submittable, it is all too common for publications to charge a ~$3 submission fee for online submissions. It seems like a reasonable thing, but given that a 2% acceptance rate is a good number, that means that you'd have to make $150 on average for every accepted piece just to break even. Most markets pay less. I have adopted a solid rule against paying submission fees. I will very rarely pay an application fee for a conference or entry fee for a contest, but even that I tend to avoid.
2. Perhaps the most depressing thing about reading John Fante’s Ask the Dust were the dollar amounts that were mentioned in the novel. Magazines paid more in nominal dollar amounts for stories in the 1930s than they do now.
Re: Ask HN: Any successful transitions from a tech/IT career to working in the arts?
#53There reason you don't hear about these transitions too often is because it's virtually impossible to have a "career" solely in the arts. I've had many friends over the years who where all variety of artists/creatives working in the arts including performing art, visual arts, writing, musicians etc. Skills range all over the board from talented amateurs to highly trained/skilled professionals. Nearly all of them, eve…
The closest thing to a full time job that pays a living wage in the arts is to become a professor I think many people here are missing the career of a tattoo artist (though the OP was asking about literature, not visual arts). They can get paid as much as contract programmer -- $30 to $100 an hour -- or even a dentist, e.g. $200-300/hour if independent and well known. Ironically, tattooing is one of the few forms of…
wut? People are getting tattoos to get laid now?
Re: Ask HN: Any successful transitions from a tech/IT career to working in the arts?
#54Get into data journalism. Subscribe to the Hacks/Hackers email newsletter. Each week they share job listings. https://www.hackshackers.com/
Re: Ask HN: Any successful transitions from a tech/IT career to working in the arts?
#55I have a journalism degree and work as a software engineer at a newspaper. The place I work allows pretty much anyone on staff to pitch story ideas, and if the editors like the idea enough, you can write it and get it published.
You can perhaps try to first get a tech job in the industry you want to be in, such as journalism or media, then see if you can internally transfer. Might be easier than quitting your job and randomly applying to media companies to be a writer. Also you can see if it's something you actually want to do if you're around other writers and journalists a lot.
Just a suggestion though, I don't know your full backstory so it really depends on your situation.
Re: Ask HN: Any successful transitions from a tech/IT career to working in the arts?
#56You could Consider going into VFX, as either a Technical Animator (Think Maya/Blender, animating creatures etc), or a Creature Effects person (wrangling Fur and other strange character effects), or a support Pipeline Engineer, where you are in the background helping all the artists in the Studio make the VFX shots.
Lots of the time, you will save your teammates hides by introducing in useful tools if you can program well with python etc.
Although I personally think just working a normal boring low-stress programming job is great, then doing Art on the side whenever creativity hits... Doing Art when you are not feeling creative _IS THE WORST_
Re: Ask HN: Any successful transitions from a tech/IT career to working in the arts?
#57TLDR: Start with some CLI text games in Node.js :) Three viable options: * Work in tech until you're financially independent (you should be able to pull this off in a decade or 15 years at most), then retire from tech and start working in writing/journalism full time without needing to worry about the fact that you could be making $40k at best for the rest of your life. You'd have plenty of time. After leaving a yout…
> Broaden your understanding of the arts to include games I came here to post this. I only worked in the game dev industry for ~6 months, but it was clear to me this is how I would break into any form of "art" myself. All manner of creative things exist in the space of game development too. Writing, painting, music, cinema, modeling, etc. It's all there.
Frank Lantz, who ran the NYU Game Center when I was there, likes to compare games to opera because of the mind-boggling variety of disciplines involved in the production of big budget games. I think it's a pretty apt comparison
Separately, outside of AAA commercial gamedev, tons of people are doing things around games that are very close in spirit, intended function/audience, etc to traditional High Art
For my money though, the sweet spot where the most interesting and funnest work gets done is experimental-but-commercial solo/tinyteam indie gamedev. Stuff like Baba Is You, Bennett Foddy, Stephen Lavelle, Michael Brough, etc
Re: Ask HN: Any successful transitions from a tech/IT career to working in the arts?
#58Hi guys :)
The only person I have ever known to keep a full-time career in the Arts his entire life is a pianist working in classical dance. His work is "piano labour"; I have seen him after 13 hours at the keyboard (on tour) as repetiteur - such tours might last 3 months and the year is packed end-to-end with tours.
So that's the tier of musicians below superstar level who have careers and buy houses on mortgages.
I'm a free-form improvising guitarist. I don't depend on music for an income so I don't get stressed. I can have a nice conversation with my guitar wherever and lots of people like my work.
I represent the tier of musicians who have fun!
Re: Ask HN: Any successful transitions from a tech/IT career to working in the arts?
#59Here's my suggestion. No matter the field you work in, if you work for someone else, it's less fun and fulfilling than if you worked on your own ideas. If you switch to arts, the only difference is going to be that you might enjoy doing work for someone else a bit more. The trade off is going to be _a lot less money_ and potentially less time to work on your own ideas because you have to sustain yourself, your family and some quality of living.
You could take a different approach. You can buy time with money, and you happen to be in a highly paid field, so you could either reduce your hours to part-time to maintain a level of income that allows you to pay the bills, or, alternatively, make a plan to optimize your CS career such that you can retire early by the time you're 37, while keeping arts as a hobby (e.g. get into a FAANG as a senior engineer at $275K+/year and save/invest wisely). Afterwards, you could go full-time working on your own art ideas, not for someone else. At 27, 37 feels like it's a lifetime away, but 10 years fly by _fast_, especially the older you get.
That said, if you're posting here, I'm assuming you are semi-seriously willing to take such risk, and if there's a time for this risk to be taken, it's definitely now, while you're still in your 20s, because in your 30s not only do most people have a family (or at least a larger family than in their 20s), you have all sorts of bills to pay, including more medical bills. Just be mentally prepared to be permanently behind your colleagues professionally and financially in 5 years when you decide to come back and take a lower level job than you would have otherwise had if you stuck around in the CS field for those 5 years.
Re: Ask HN: Any successful transitions from a tech/IT career to working in the arts?
#60I have a tech career, but am a working jazz musician on the side. I have a couple of thoughts about this. First, ignore the economic implications. The reason is simply that the economics of an arts career are a known known. Nobody goes into those careers blindly. You won't either. Perhaps the only widespread misconception is that there's a tier of artists below the superstar level, who can earn a living at it. There…
> Perhaps the only widespread misconception is that there's a tier of artists below the superstar level, who can earn a living at it.
Music and writing are especially bad, but in areas where you make an unique non-copyable artifact, such as a painting or a sculpture, there's a significant number of working artists who are definitely not superstars. Probably most of them take commissions to make ends meet, but they get to do them with their choice of style and technique, which is half of the fun for many.