Ask HN: Does anyone here have an art degree?

PhD History of Art, BA Typography, art school degree graphics

No. We don't. There's nothing in the world like standing up on stage in front of thousands of people and having a mistake creep into your work and having people write about it in every newspaper there is.

Code review is absolutely nothing compared to what it takes to put yourself out there as a musician or a scientist and have it shot down. Absolutely not even close.

Couldn't agree more with one and two.

The understanding with most art is that it takes several rounds of critique for a piece to even be complete, much less for an artist to reach their overall potential. And it's considered an honor to receive criticism from someone whose work you admire.

Similarly, self-management is completely necessary if you're completing something long-term, like a novel. Scrappiness, too -- it's very often the case that you have to skip around the gatekeepers to reach an audience for the first time.

I'd also add that there's a certain strange cognitive advantage. A lot of art is built on taking concepts from one situation and applying them somewhere foreign -- translating the feeling of loss into a series of musical notes, or applying the principles of the punk rock movement to dance.

I know it sounds like bullshit to a lot of hackers. But that trick, of abstracting away the details of problems so that their solutions can be used in isomorphic situations, is very handy in computer science.

I have a BA from what is nowadays the Department of Film, Television & Scenography at the Aalto University in Helsinki. (It's the only university-level film school in Finland, a country that is largely irrelevant in cinema.) I studied editing and post-production.

I started my studies just at the turn of the millennium, when old analog equipment was being replaced with a first wave of digital products. At school, the very last 16mm editing desks had just been carted off to the basement and replaced with Avid workstations consisting of classic MacOS computers and Digital Betacam decks.

I already had a software hobbyist background; I knew C and understood graphics algorithms to a reasonable extent... So it became obvious rather quickly that there was more opportunity for me in participating in this industry's software disruption, rather than trying to build a creative career in a small Nordic country where the film industry operates on government subsidies.

In 2002, the ATI Radeon 9700 was released as the first GPU with fully programmable pixel-level shading capabilities and floating point support. It was clear that you could do pro-quality video processing in realtime on this hardware: it cost a minimal fraction of whatever Avid and others were peddling and was 10x more powerful. So I jumped on that and started a company around GPU-based effects software a few years later. I was terribly bad at the business side, but it was great otherwise, and I'm still working in the field of content creation software.

Film school was extremely useful for a software career in two ways:

1) Editing a film and developing a software package are fundamentally similar on some levels. There's a certain set of "raw materials" that you have to work with and can't change without extreme cost. The raw material is based on an idea and specification that existed at one point, but you have to evaluate the current situation as objectively as possible and ignore the original intent to some extent, because the viewers/users won't know it. Shipping something will require you to make sacrifices on things that everyone originally thought would be essential.

2) A film is always teamwork, and there are some difficult people in the field. Especially as a post-production professional, you have to keep your ego in check. This was difficult for me in the beginning, but I got better and less attached to my own ideas of how to proceed, as long as the whole of the project was being served. I feel this has been a useful attitude in building software too: a developer with too much ego is even more detrimental than a film editor with the same.

Things can get brutal in art school indeed! I think that a big part of this (and its one of the parts that would be less tolerated in say, and engineering school) is that there can at times be a significant political dimension to the criticism. That is to say that the critiques are nominally focused on such and such a technique or choice of subject matter, but are actually about aligning oneself with a faction advocating the trend du jour or that one professor who hates anything X. Having said that, this sort of stuff certainly happens in business settings as well, which supports GGPs point.