Ask HN: Any successful transitions from a tech/IT career to working in the arts?
Asking this to read about some personal stories and/or advice. I read a lot about people transitioning from regular tech/programming jobs to maybe quants/finances etc., but rarely about arts (literature, music, sociology, history etc.).
I got into a CS curriculum right after finishing my high school on a whim; I'd always wanted to pursue a career in literature/writing/journalism from a younger age (but couldn't due to personal reasons). Now that I'm almost 27 and have been in the industry for ~5 years now, I'm wondering if I should decide on taking the plunge, or at least plan for it... since I do feel the friction in transitioning getting a bit higher as I spend more time in this field.
82 comments
[ 0.30 ms ] story [ 216 ms ] threadA word of warning, the nice jobs in your target fields are very very hard to get, you'll probably struggle to compete if you're not focused on writing and humanities since school. You may shoot your resume into fifty black holes before anyone gives you the time of day, probably because every opening gets hundreds of resumes for something like Literature Critic or Staff Writer.
In the end, that's all prudence allowing you to keep your lucrative tech job while experimenting. But if you really can't stomach tech, maybe you should try a hybrid idea. Get into tech journalism or writing about tech first, and then use that stepping stone to write about whatever else later on.
Good luck!!
As for people who have done it, an example that comes to mind is Daniel Suarez, an IT consultant turned novelist: https://daniel-suarez.com/
I'd also recommend digging around for John Scalzi's recommendations. He's a former finance journalist turned novelist, so he has a lot of good advice about the practical and financial side of becoming a full-time writer. For example:
https://whatever.scalzi.com/2008/02/11/unasked-for-advice-to...
Work on whatever interests you part time / on weekends / before or after work, and if you feel you are having some traction with it, then proceed with the plunge.
The risk with taking the plunge immediately is that if you won't be good enough at whatever you choose to do, then you will be even further demotivated.
There is also a real chance that you won't like it as a full-time career, and there are myriad reasons why. Some personal (e.g. loneliness) others environmental (e.g. politics). A career in tech has issues, to be sure, but so does a career in any other field.
If you like the data you gather in the experimental phase then take the plunge.
I have a BS&MS in computer science and transitioned to agricultural media starting in 2006. It helped that I volunteered for several ag media organizations, meeting people that really understand that world.
Also attend events to see who is doing what.
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, even the a few I know that played in professional symphony orchestras, needed another, non-creative full time job to pay the bills. Visual and performing (drama) artists in particular all needed another source of income. The only exception to this would be people living in extremely low cost of living areas, but even then all of them had some sort of major financial support coming from somewhere else (spouse/family).
The closest thing to a full time job that pays a living wage in the arts is to become a professor, but that is insanely competitive and many of my friends who went that route found it ultimately unfulfilling. Some visual artists will also work as graphic designers or in an area like UX, but that's still a full time job just using your skills for someone else, not really making your own art.
I would recommend you talk to artists of all sorts that you know (or reach out if you don't). If you're interested in visual arts go to a few gallery openings, chat with artist, if it's literature reach out to your favorite authors (side note, may Booker prize finalists will only every sell a few thousand copies, just to get a sense of the competition in that space) Many of the ones that are making a living at it are probably not doing the art they would prefer most of the time, and the income they are bringing in is very low compared to even poorly paying software engineer gigs.
My advice would be to find a low stress, remote programming gig and devote as much time as you can to your preferred art. Making six figures at your 9-5 and working in the arts is much easier than working at a coffee shop to support your arts. If you really want to do it full time, then I would recommend putting in a few years at a very high paying FAANG type job and finding the lowest cost of living community you can with an arts scene and see how it goes.
I am an amateur in a lot of different arts (music, painting, writing being the main focus). I have friends who are professionals in these areas and each of them of them has a day job they don’t care for to support their art. I was moderately close to making an attempt at being a professional musician in my early 20s, but playing enough local shows and only making $50-100 to split between 4 people dissuaded me of that notion. Now I have a fairly hard, but not stressful job in STEM that pays well and has good work life balance.
I find I have a couple advantages because of my reasonable stream of STEM based income: - I don’t ever have to care about selling anything I create, which makes it less stressful - I can afford almost anything I want to tinker with for a particular art
Consuming and creating art is a very critical part of my being, but given the realities of our modern economy and the insane competition in the arts, I am glad that I will be a “forever amateur”.
My little sister has a fine arts degree and has worked as an artist. She's had lots of write-ups in local and regional papers, and has sold at least one piece for about $10,000.
She describes being an artist like this: "No one wants to pay you for your work."
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 art that's not economically affected by computers -- you can't download a tattoo :) Computers made every form of knowledge easier to copy and thus less expensive: software (open source), journalism, literature, music, and movies. But it didn't do that to tattoos.
I think they also follow Jamie Zawinski's law, i.e. write software that will help your users get laid. People will pay more for tattoos than they would pay for something they hang in their living room. (This isn't a negative statement about the art form; I don't think anyone who tattoos would disagree that it's often sexual)
First, find synergetic fields. Parent post is a good example. I definitely think there's something to be said for you UX roles. You could make the switch.
A new suggestion is you have to leverage your current skills as a platform for your new skill / career. Once you know what that is, use your coding prowess to open doors.
For example, if your thing is history, you could go work as a dev at a gaming company that does historical simulations, such as paradox. Or you could do system IT for a museum or the like, to then jump in a job opening of your choice in your field.
There are game studios looking for music talent with tech background, so breaking into music should not be difficult. If your thing is public performance, this route may be interesting - since gaming live music is a very underserved market. Live performance is still going to be a gig for some time and you wont be able to to turn it into a FT job, but you will be both composing music as a FT job and playing it for audiences as a hobby. Thats as fulfilling as it gets
You have a big advantage of having a skill that most modern companies need. Best, the larger the company, the more needs they have in the arts (logos, marketing collateral, art, photography etc) Leverage your tech background to get a foot in the door.
For each Stephen King there is a million writers who are unknown to public and struggle to make ends meet.
That's not to say you shouldn't do it - but you should be able to approach the proposition with grim determination or flippant playfulness.
What stops you from writing in your free time while having the CS career pay the bills?
I wonder what you mean by “working in the arts.” The examples you offer are pretty diverse! Literature, writing and journalism: on one hand, literature is pretty much only an artistic, creative venture. At the other end, journalism isn’t going to feel very creatively engaging by contrast. But it is working in the arts in the same way being an arts administrator might be.
Your job is to figure out what you need. What’s driving this desire to switch careers? I suspect that you don’t really wanna be a journalist - but that the same pragmatism that makes you worry that you’d be transitioning too late already is also making you pick something that sounds more practical, rather than picking something that you actually want.
In short, you need to find out what you actually need. And it might be that you need to try on the artist label for size. It might not fit, but if you start to feel like you are motivated by expressing yourself, then it might be the thing for you. Also, I’ve learned that there are tons of other creative people who make great things who do not need to do it every day. Find out if you just need this as a hobby, or if you really need to do it once a day.
Working as an artist is tough, but so is anything. I couldn’t really make my career in tech feel okay. It’s been far easier for me to be what I always should have been.
But it took me a decade to realize I needed to make that transition because it also took me that long to accept I was an artist. Therapy helped. Also, actually doing artistic work helped. I learned how to write songs, I picked up other instruments. I started screenwriting, and got accepted to a writing lab.
That last bit happened last year - it’s where I met many other awesome folks who were making their careers work. But again, that happened because it built on this long journey I had to accepting my own self. I was always this creative, but for my own “personal reasons,” I wasn’t allowed to have that as a kid.
The advice I have is that a lot of the cliches are true.
Per Bukowski, you shouldn’t make any sort of leap unless it comes bursting out of you like a rocket, but if you’ve learned all sorts of reasons to abandon this part of yourself, well, it can take a long time for the rocket ship to take off.
That’s when you take the leap. The transition involves so much more work that gets you to that point, by allowing yourself to open yourself up and feel who your really are, and by learning your tools. But one day you’ll know you’ve got to jump. And that’ll be terrifying! But hey, you’ll know it’s time.
My advice FWIW is that if you're determined to make a new career as a creative, to find some low-stress, absolutely 9-5 job that allows you to just do your job and not worry about it afterwards. The government here has IT jobs that are 35 hours a week. My expectation is that the work would be soul-sucking and the pay very low.
But the money, even if 35% of market rates, can perhaps be enough to keep a roof over your head and Corn Flakes in the cupboard. Stress might be good for creativity, but I can't imagine that eviction notices slipped under the door will help you do your best work.
Furthermore, not having to continuously read technical books and blogs trying to stay on top of the latest trends will leave you hours - and even more importantly brain space and energy - to put 25 or 30 hours into your craft. You'll be able to really put the energy into making your art what you want it to be.
My model for this is a sculptor I know - he's very good, he has a few large sculptures in the city parks and has trained with famous artists all over the world. He became a firefighter. 3 weeks on (12h days, 6 or 7 days a week I forget), 3 weeks off. He was able to lead two lives, live in a pretty good house with a nice studio, and concentrate on becoming the best artist he could be rather than carving pokemon figurines to sell at farmers markets to make ends meet.
FWIW, I've not found this to be true. My Enterprise IT stints were enjoyable, with lower pay, but not so low as to be unworkable. I'd say they fell around 80% of SaaS rates, not the 35% you proposed. They were exactly the type of day job I'd want if I were really putting my energies into growing out a new side gig.
So, no, I didn't transition, haha.
Lately, I'm looking into NFTs, out of technical curiosity, but might as well mint some tokens for my own stuff.
So, perhaps that's one avenue you could try. I imagine there are writers that need technical help with blogs, publishing tools, and so on. You could barter that help for advice, contacts, and so forth.
The good news is that you're young at merely 27.
More good news: you have a someone financing you, your current job.
Think about being an Artist as being an entrepreneur running your own startup, the beauty here is that you control every single aspect:
- you control the product: you can change it and tweak it at any time. Discontinue a product line, or take it back
- you control the pricing: free or $1,000,000, BOGO; it doesn't matter, you control it as you see fit
- you control the branding: NFT or mass production, the choice is yours, and you can always change your mind
- you control the positioning: for the elites or for the masses? Mass e-commerce distribution or atelier-style single sales?
Just like a start-up you will need:
- some type of business plan, where you address all the choices outlined above; a timeline, a capital budget, and timeline of activities
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_viable_product
Continue to work full time as you start moonlighting at your new venture. With time you'll increase the moonlighting and possibly decrease the dayjob. At some point there will be an inflection point where you jump ship and pursue the new venture full time and either drop the dayjob or scale it down to part-time / free lance.
Resources:
* Jerry Saltz book: How to be an Artist
* Follow jerry on IG/Twitter
* Paul Graham book: Hackers and Painters
I spent 25 years in tech before transitioning into non-profit work. The friction/inertia was a bell curve for me and was primarily driven teo things:
Money: For the first 15 years or so, the money/benefits were the archetypal golden handcuffs. At first, the more I made, the more financial responsibilities I took on. But I didn't keep upgrading my lifestyle past a certain point and I kept increasing my savings rate. At the end of my time in tech, my savings allowed me to choose my career without consideration of the money.
Skills: I realized I wanted to do something else and so I shifted my career away from narrow specialization in hands on tech to more strategic roles (product and people management). This gave me a wealth of skills that were more easily translatable to roles outside of tech.
Note that I am not specifically advocating for the path I took, but just giving my perspective on how it worked out for me.
First, I would suggest finding out what you want to do. You mention journalism and literature, which are quite different. Which one more appeals to you?
As you may have seen, many techies here have GitHub side projects. So I’d recommend starting off by continuing with your tech day job and treating your writing as a kind of side project.
If journalism is your calling, maybe you can start by writing a few free ‘articles’ on a blogging platform.
If you want to do literature, then start by writing something. If you have a story in mind, get started on it. Maybe it’s a short story, maybe it’s a novel.
But whatever it is : Start Today! Write just a single paragraph, even if it’s pure shit. And frankly the first paragraph of a first draft is likely to be shit so just let it be shit, it can be heavily edited or cut later. But you’ve written something, you’ve gotten started, and have planted a seed from which to build on!
Also, Twitter has a brilliant supportive writers community. There are all kinds of things like hashtag games where you write a snippet based on the “word of the day”, each day there are dozens of different hashtags. See #vss365 as one of the most popular ones.
Most authors I’ve seen and follow on Twitter have day jobs. Some have only quit their job after publishing a few successful novels.
But the key is to write something and get something down and make progress on it. Start as a side project and see where it goes.
And get yourself writing that first paragraph today!!!
I spent the better part of a decade trying to make it as a screenwriter. During that time I worked what was basically part time dev work. Finding those situations was a little tricky, but the income was comfortable and the time demands low.
Despite having scripts that got me meetings with nearly everyone I wanted, nothing ever moved forward and eventually I moved on. I know I sacrificed some income over that time period, but I'm glad I got to play the game for a while.
Now I'm still working part time, fully remote, but self-publishing novels that sell a few copies. That satisfies my creative needs if not my ego needs.
If you want to write, start now. There's no point in waiting. But it'll be easier on you if you keep a decent income while doing it.
That said, there are many ways a tech background is useful in the arts, and some of the most interesting work I have done in tech has been with arts-oriented organizations. Of course quite a number of arts folk subsidize their passion through day jobs in tech.
I would recommend viewing it not as a transition, per se, but an adding on. Good luck.
This is the depressing truth: as you get older you want and need more financial stability. So if you do want to make the switch, you should do it now. Be willing to be broke for the next 5-10 years as you chase your dream, then, worst case scenario, switch back to tech.