Ask HN: Does anyone here have an art degree?

[1] Top architectural offices do mostly competition work. It's not uncommon that one architectural competition has hundreds of participants and only one winner.

Forget the tech, the syntax of languages, and look at what you are actually doing -- You have a vision of something you want to build. You have a selection of tools with which to build it. You start from nothing, and build up to your vision. But it will only be considered a success if other people like the result, and comprehend what you were trying to do.

That process of creating something from scratch is exactly the same in Fine Arts, or in software.

As far as how I got into tech, the story is pretty boring. I graduated from college in '94. Needed a job. IBM Research was hiring support people. I applied, got the job, moved from support into coding over a couple years, and just worked my career from there.

I agree with lots of responses in this thread about the roles of conceptual integrity and openness to criticism.

The other thing I would add is that my path to programming seems to have given me an orientation towards the outer shell of what I'm delivering, whether that thing is sensory or not (i.e. GUI or API). That's not to say I don't care about internals and constructs, but that I care about them _in service_ of that outer thing[2]. Midway through my programming career I learned about real outside-in TDD and it was like a lightning bolt where everything came together and anything seemed possible.

It saddens me to hear about the supposed importance of STEM education, as if the only thing left to do in today's economy is to deliver predictable implementations of finite technical problems. IMHO, this attitude is doing a great disservice to society, to individuals, and to the field of engineering itself.

[1] I needed CS 121 for a math credit that year and failed. In retrospect I realize that the class was entirely focused on for loops and divorced from the eventual goal of writing software. As a study in contrast, I was simultaneously taking "Programming for Artists" taught by the creator of Kid Pix. I learned a smaller set of skills, but really caught the bug for learning more. (Teach them to yearn for the sea and all that.)

[2] Ok not entirely. Some programming constructs are beautiful in their own right (e.g. map/reduce, CQRS, polymorphism...).

In particular I've learnt to apply the many of the concepts I learned from graphic design/illustration to problems in software engineering. I also learned that for all the differences they had, they were both about problem solving, merely in different media, and that right-brained or left-brained, I'm more interested in solving problems than I am interested in the context in which I solve them.

Also, art students are on the whole way more social, so I learnt to communicate on a whole different level than I had at high school.

Also, way better drugs.