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Quitting engineering to pursue art full-time

staysketchy.com

71–80 of 159 posts

Re: Quitting engineering to pursue art full-time

#71
post #35

Bruh I was just opening up my computer to apply for a CS masters to advance my career as a languages & humanities degree holder turned SE who always wanted to do art. Now I'm back to thinking I should try and work on art until it can take over my career. It's sort of upsetting that doing something I'm bad at (SE) makes me more money than anything I'm good at. Feels like it traps me.

I went from art to software. I feel like software is the ultimate form of creative expression.

Re: Quitting engineering to pursue art full-time

#72
post #37

This is why I never really tried. I thought I could sell art but it's a grind and political. It seems like either you can work constantly to sell art to fund making art or half ass it at some corporate job, make a ton of money and make art?

People seem to make a decent living doing furry art commissions. Looks like far less grind than other kinds of art and also not corporate.

Re: Quitting engineering to pursue art full-time

#73

I did this some years ago myself and I want to say the only thing I miss is...agile working! Throw your tomatoes now. It's fantastic to work in this field and very fulfilling but I consistently find the quality of teamwork and coordination to be much lacking compared to my engineering past. I wish I could sit down with a group of musicians and give them a bunch of Jira tickets to work on for the sprint before the upc…

What happened to people before processes?

Re: Quitting engineering to pursue art full-time

#74
post #63
post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any ideas on actual roles? I think the thing that kills me is the mental exhaustion of software development. Just thinking about how to solve problems all day is mentally taxing.

IMHO, Farming is the ideal switch for a techie. Technically, you are switching from the likes of Matrix to speaking to animals. Another activity that I believe would bring more joy than 99% of jobs, if not all , is charity .

Are you speaking from experience? Personally - speaking as someone who had needed to plant, hill, water, weed, and harvest plenty of sacks of potatoes by hand as a child - I would say that coding is vastly preferable over farming; and in fact, that most things are preferable over farming.

Re: Quitting engineering to pursue art full-time

#75

Reminds me of the classic: "Sorry I missed your comment of many months ago. I no longer build software; I now make furniture out of wood. The hours are long, the pay sucks, and there's always the opportunity to remove my finger with a table saw, but nobody asks me if I can add an RSS feed to a DBMS, so there's that :-)" https://github.com/docker/cli/issues/267#issuecomment-695149...

and that right there is why RSS is dying. :)

Re: Quitting engineering to pursue art full-time

#76
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

YC startup idea: AI generated-articles designed to give computer programmers dopamine hits when they get to correct a small error/issue/discrepancy. Like Zyns but distracting. Maybe it’s like a reward. Fix a tough bug and your manager sends you an article where you get to point out that the author is incorrectly using “strawman fallacy.”

You could probably get a better ROI offering opportunities to make snarky, condescending comments

Go through my comment history lol. I’ve been giving it away for years!

Re: Quitting engineering to pursue art full-time

#78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

fiddling with printers and plotters isn't the hard part, most likely the marketing part is because anything sells if you find the fools. The whole stick of this article strikes me as marketing in the first place.

I'm pretty sure you are severely understimating the amount of work that goes into quality art pieces, no matter the medium. Also, thinking of customers as "fools" only makes sense if you believe you are selling/producing garbage. If what you make has value, then whoever buys it is no fool.

You're also underestimating the amount of great quality art that simply doesn't sell. Hence the power of marketing. And the art that sells for lots and lots of money is also marketing and financial gimmicks the art world does behind the scenes. Unfortunately it's not quality that matters, it's the notoriety of the artist. It goes back to marketing in circles.

Re: Quitting engineering to pursue art full-time

#79
post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or to put it another way: Spanish can understand English. English can't understand Spanish. Speaking English you can communicate with English and Spanish without also speaking Spanish, kill two birds with one stone. The virtues of a lingua franca.

Funny how dominant languages of the past have died but now the lingua angla feels forever. I wonder if that's how it feels to be at the height of some culture's age: it feels immortal. Then it falls and is only remembered as the past: either as humorous, or as sophisticated, but not meant for normal use. We shall cement this one by creating AIs in the American image.

The Roman Empire seemed forever for those living within it too!

Re: Quitting engineering to pursue art full-time

#80
post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or to put it another way: Spanish can understand English. English can't understand Spanish. Speaking English you can communicate with English and Spanish without also speaking Spanish, kill two birds with one stone. The virtues of a lingua franca.

Funny how dominant languages of the past have died but now the lingua angla feels forever. I wonder if that's how it feels to be at the height of some culture's age: it feels immortal. Then it falls and is only remembered as the past: either as humorous, or as sophisticated, but not meant for normal use. We shall cement this one by creating AIs in the American image.

That cement will always crumble, but the next empire will probably be built with it's pieces. It's no accident that the current global language is a derivative of the last 'worldwide' language, Latin, which itself flourished from its relationship to Alexander's Greece, a language which stole its alphabet from the semitic empires. Nothing new under the sun.
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