Ask HN: Any successful transitions from a tech/IT career to working in the arts?

A 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!!

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.

With the current advances in AI, I expect that we soon will see virtual- or at least cyborg-painters, -musicians and -writers.

I for one have been interested in using AI to create the "roughest stroke in the history of art" for a while now. Currently I am experimenting with this new algorithm:

https://twitter.com/marekgibney/status/1434534326943748100

I only did two high resolution images so far, as the algorithm takes days to create a single hires image. But the second picture I posted to Reddit stroke a chord over there, got 1300 upvotes and some requests for posters.

So maybe digital art is a thing?

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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 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.