Ask HN: Does anyone here have an art degree?
BFA student turned full stack developer here. I wanted to actually share WHY artists can really excel in this space, both positive and negative:<p>1. We've been trained to critique, and communicate issues constructively. This is absolutely essential to working quickly, the sooner you realize there is an existential problem with what you're doing, the sooner you can work through them. I've become an absolute user story master because of what I learned at art school.<p>2. Self management, I prefer to work alone because I get the best work done when I can juggle and understand all the variables of the task. This forces me to be adept at a lot of different things but also means that as a developer you can pretty much leave me alone unless I really suck at something.<p>3. Asking why all the time, critiquing is one thing but the worst experiences I've had are when other developers say things like "It's always been like this". For example, I came into a shop where their build process had an SCSS linter that would error if anyone tried to use a color that wasn't a variable. This ended up creating the habit of a single stylesheet with around 200 slight adjustments of colors. <i>Critical thinking</i> is whats important for building systems with low technical debt, and I think artists are able to realize something is turning into technical debt much quicker than their engineer counterparts.<p>The tradeoff is that I have a huge communication gap with traditional computer scientists, I really have to work and study algorithms on my spare time and I still struggle heavily with mathematical notations.