Coders are creatives too: Where's our love?... Developers conjure something from nothing, all day, every day; to my mind this is creation in its purest sense. Okay, we’re not knocking up a universe in seven days or putting the final touches to The Scream – although it may often feel like that – but building order, fun, even beauty, from a tapestry of ones and noughts is …
I was thinking last night, that my irritating and arrogant comments about mistakes in the prose have been getting less frequent of late. Then it hit me - El Reg has improved. The quality has simply gone up. And in a world where this usually happens in reverse, it's good to see.
Looks like I need another outlet for my pedantry, though ...
Certainly a lot of stirring going on there!
However I must confess my greatest pleasure as a developer is to deliver something where the user has *no idea* of the complexity behind the scenes. And to be honest I value the colouring-in types as they add something to the end-product that I can't contribute - if heads can be banged together for long enough there is a good chance that developers and "visual" creatives can together produce something that is reliable, loaded with functionality, and sublimely easy to use (because it doesn't rely on the end-users nearly nonexistent logical faculties).
I get a huge kick from seeing something I wrote 10 years ago still out there, quietly doing its job... and knowing that no-one is looking to find the low-life that wrote it.
Speaking with my QA hat on (and asbestos suit) maybe things would be different if the vast majority of developers nowadays were actually, you know, *developing* rather than plugging in other peoples solutions from stackoverflow and suchlike.
It might also help if most developers could actually design simple and easy to use software on their own. Although most of you seem to think you have god like powers in this respect, producing magical life changing software that a baby could use I'm sorry to say that no, most of you don't, which is unsurprising given the fundamentally autistic nature of the majority in this field. Most just chuck in options and parameters with the unspoken assumption that if they know how it works and what little workarounds and tweaks are needed then their end customers will. Bit of a heads up here, if the QA people have trouble working out how your software works you can be certain the end customer will be completely bamboozled.
And while I'm working up a head of rant, having worked in mobile telecoms for over a decade it might also help if you coders actually tried running software on target when you think it's ready rather than just whizzing through on an emulator then chucking it over to mel. Seriously, try putting it on a device and just checking the basics works, it'll save me having to do it for you and then pissing you off when I tell you, for example, that , your app launches a grey screen that than a map and there's no point in me testing it. And please don't take it personally when I tell you your software is broken, I didn't brake it, I just discovered how crap it was, *you* broke it when you made, having a hissy fit at me just makes you look like a twat.
I was on a contract setting up a QA department a few months back in company that had been previously developer driven in terms of design and implementation and when I tried to introduce the concept of release notes to senior developers all I got was a room full of people looking at their feet and an anguished cry of "But we're artists!". Yeah, they're artists now, drawing the dole after the company when down.
AC cos I still have to work with you guys
An article that tells software developers that they are under appreciated will be read approvingly by software developers.
The software developers at our firm churn out shite, do so slowly, do not listen to feature requests, and do not act on bug reports. They think they know best. They actually need 'a creative' to fucking tell them what is best.
I guess many people pirate software as they don't see it as creative.
Me, I'm the opposite.. I'm a creative-commie who thinks all creatives should be free for personal use - so songs and films should be open source just the same way as software
Great article which hits the nail on the head though.
Any chance you can stop reducing my job to paint by numbers? It's pretty insulting and shows a complete lack of knowledge about the field. Graphic design is not a job everyone can do despite your suggestion. I'm not paid minimum wage and my colleagues are not doing this job because they couldn't get work at the tesco checkout.
If programmers want to call themselves creatives nobody is going to stop them. Personally though I've always hated the term. It tends to be used by managers who like to explain away what I do as the result of some sort of magical power that i've been imbued with. I'd much rather they recognise the years of hard work and practice that have gotten my skills to this point.
If you want people to have respect for your profession maybe you could stop being so damn condescending about everyone else's?
"Any chance you can stop reducing my job to paint by numbers? It's pretty insulting and shows a complete lack of knowledge about the field."
Oh you use paint? So sorry, you're clearly a step up the ladder. My insults were aimed at the crayoners.
In all seriousness, I would *hate* to do your job. sitting there with some halfwit peering over your shoulder asking for everything to be pinker, redder, bluer, and everything bigger than everything else? God no.
Correct and rightly so. A good, intuitive interface, that shows all the information needed, hides the unneeded and can be operated without needing an instruction manual is indeed a work of art. As indeed can be a program, app etc.
However (1) the beauty isn't inherent in the 1s and 0s, the beauty is in the sensory input provided to the end user. Most laymen can't see the brilliance of a van Gogh painting by looking at the dots while maybe an artist can really appreciate that. Similairly I can't expect a consumer to see any beauty in my code, even though a coder might see that.
and (2) Pretty much all software nowadays is developed by teams, customers can only recognise and show appreciation to individuals, hence the Jobs-worship. But I reckon that if instead of chatting up a lady in a bar with OOP, you point at her shiny-shiny and say 'I built that' it would have a more positive effect. Or maybe not
The reality is function.
How many items we use today contain code? From lowly digital watches to tomahawk cruise missiles?
I find it constantly amazing that GPS works at all.
To look at something just a second time and think to yourself on reflection, omg how the f@# does it do that?
Think about that.
In our noisy microwave environment, mobile phone networks, wireless LANS etc... lots of devices all within quite a relatively narrow band.That's all amazing stuff people just don't see... Who keeps your flybywire planes in the air? Your electronic ignition system going in your car? Your digital TV? Your pacemaker going?
Now that is beauty.
Who are the coders behind all these feats? Hint: Not Apple. Not M$.
They are not visible. But they are there. Trust me.
Completely agreed with Fibbles. Mostly a good article here, but there's one point here that I *really* take issue with:
"graphic designers [...]; a troupe of ne’r do wells who pinch from a Google image search and spend the rest of their day colouring-in."
"a person whose greatest educational achievement is crayoning without going over the lines"
Utter bovine excrement. From an article that's bemoaning the lack of public understanding of programming, presenting art & design as the work of a bunch of uneducated, unskilled idiots displays a pretty shocking lack of understanding of the artistic process, and not a small amount of hypocrisy.
Speaking as a former developer who has recently moved from the world of software architecture to the greener pastures of the artistic world, this is a huge misrepresentation. You get unskilled idiots in any industry, including programming (you know; those people who "don't quite get it" and seem to cause vastly more bugs than they ever fix). In the same way that getting software design right is difficult, have a go at producing a decent, expressive life drawing, or try to come up with a decent product logo (must work in all sizes, all manner of stationary, different backgrounds, must fit on our website, fit references to Metallica in it, and could you pleeease incorporate that magic shade of pink my daughter loves so much?). Believe me - art design just as hard as software design! Comparing art to colouring in images nicked from Google is like comparing coding to copy/pasting from StackOverflow.
I could equally point to an opposite trend in games and films, where the media and general public are all very happy to faun over programmers and technology like motion capture, but are generally unaware what a poor technology it actually is, and how many artists are required to correct/enhance and sometimes completely replace the nonsense that comes out of a mocap suite before it's ready for viewing by the public.
In short, there's a balance to be had here. Certainly there are times where programmers don't get the recognition they deserve, but then again, neither do artists. This article to me seems to fall into exactly the same trap that it's bemoaning. :(
'And the wheel,' said the Captain, 'what about this wheel thingy? It sounds a terribly interesting project.'
'Ah,' said the marketing girl, 'well, we're having a little difficulty there.'
'Difficulty?' exclaimed Ford. 'Difficulty? What do you mean difficulty? It's the single simplest machine in the entire Universe!'
The marketing girl soured him with a look.
'All right, Mr Wiseguy,' she said, 'you're so clever, you tell us what colour it should be.'
- The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, Douglas Adams
Completely agree with Fibbles above - there's one point here that I really take issue with:
"graphic designers [...]; a troupe of ne’r do wells who pinch from a Google image search and spend the rest of their day colouring-in."
"a person whose greatest educational achievement is crayoning without going over the lines"
Utter bovine excrement. From an article that's bemoaning a lack of public understanding of programming, presenting art & design as the work of a bunch of uneducated, unskilled idiots displays a pretty shocking lack of understanding of the artistic process, and not a small amount of hypocrisy.
Speaking as a former developer who has recently moved from the world of software architecture to the greener pastures of the artistic world, you get unskilled idiots in any industry, including programming (you know; those people who "don't quite get it" and seem to cause vastly more bugs than they ever fix). In the same way that getting software design right is difficult, try producing a decent, expressive life drawing, or try to come up with a decent product logo (must work in all sizes, all manner of stationary, different backgrounds, must fit on our website, fit references to Metallica in it, and could you pleeease incorporate that magic shade of pink my daughter loves so much?). Believe me - art design is just as hard as software design! Comparing art to colouring in images nicked from Google is like comparing coding to copy/pasting from Stack Overflow.
I could equally point to an opposite trend in games and films, where the media and general public are all very happy to faun over programmers and technology like motion capture, but are generally unaware what a poor technology it actually is, and how many artists are required to correct/enhance and sometimes completely replace the nonsense that comes out of a mocap suite before it's ready for viewing by the public.
In short, there's a balance to be had here. Certainly there are times where programmers don't get the recognition they deserve, but then again, the same's also true of artists. This article to me seems to fall into exactly the same trap that it's bemoaning. :(
...on the one hand, I can see where this article is coming from and largely agree with a lot of what it says.
On the other hand, it uses the word "mature" at one point, implying that the IT or sofrware development industry may have reached that level. I'm not sure that I agree with that. I also don't really agree with the term "software engineer" either (even though I've been saddled with the title myself in the past).
Why the nit-picking? Simple. On most of the products and projects that I worked on over the years, the last words that I would have used to describe the processes used or the end results were "mature" or "engineered". Admittedly, this was often in spite of the best efforts of the designers and developers to try to make them that way, but the painful truth was that most things ended up being best described as "shoddy lashups that should just about work so long as the wind doesn't change". This was usually as a result of badly managed user requirements, incompetent project management and a general cocked-up-ness in the whole way in which the software industry goes about what it does. But that's to be expected - the industry is still very, very young and has had to come a long way in a very short time.
However, as far as "mature" or "engineering" are concerned, I think that the IT industry still has a long way to go. Yes, a lot has been achieved and we can all be proud of doing some pretty amazing things over the years, but if the civil, chemical and mechanical engineering communities were as "mature" as computer and software development, we'd all be spending 90-odd per cent of our time rebuilding collapsed houses, running away from flood waters released by failed dams, admiring the pretty colours from exploding chemical plants, falling into rivers off wobbly bridges, scanning the sky for plummeting blazing aircraft and picking up all the gaskets, pistons and camshafts that our car engines scatter across the road every time we drive them more than 50 or 60 yards.
Which false dichotomy is that? The art-versus-craft one, that's what.
Most people (I'm not one of them, mind) would tell you that, for example, oil painting lies on the art side of the split, while programming (by whatever name you give it) lies on the craft side of the split.
Some people attack the dilemma by denying that programming is craft. Cobblers. Or, rather, not cobblers, but a totally inadequate response.
The truth is that the split is an illusion. In the ancient world, it certainly was. Our very word for what we produce, "technology", has at its heart an ancient Greek word, transcribed in the Latin alphabet as "techne" or "tekhne", that meant nothing more than "art".
So of course what I do is craft, and it is also art, because they are one and the same. Whether we call the craft craft, or engineering, or whatever, it is still art.
So I am an artist, and damned proud of it, just as I am a craftsman. The oil-painter's problem is that he has a blank canvas and racks full of paints, brushes, and so on, and someone wants a painting. My problem is that I have editors and compilers, linkers and debuggers, and someone wants a program. Progressing from the one to the other is applying at the same time of the art and the craft either of painting (the painter) or programming (me).
But the graphic designer also produces art, and craft.
Because, remember, the two things are one and the same. If you call the one a "creative" and the other a "developer" you are missing the point.
Your opinion may vary, but if it does, you are wrong.
And in the main, for what we do, its not engineering either.
Craft like those cathedral builders of old, we have plans and experience, we can get the artistic masons to put a pretty face on it, but we do not use all the mathematics to make sure what we build is 100% correct. We do try to meet our patrons specifications, even if they change their minds while we are building their church.
I've seen too many clever coders write 'optimal' code and 'elegant' data flows, and then front it with a cluster-fuck of nightmarish graphics, counter-intuitive interfaces, and user-UNfriendly presentation.
Whilst I admire coders who create applications, I don't want their elbow-patched, anoraked natures pushing their view that "the users need to use the application the way I want them to"' , paying no heed to the need of users who require elegant form as well as elegant coding.
I.e. I've been on both sides of what some people appear to believe is a fence.
I've done graphic design (everything from multilingual brochures and leaflets to websites), as well as animated sprites and tiles back in the days of Rainbird / OCP's "Art Studio" for the Atari ST.
I've also coded (in assembly language, among others) actual, published, video games too.
These days, I make my living as a translator and technical author.
Programming is a craft, like any other.
Graphic design is also a craft.
This notion we have today of "Art" vs. craft is a relatively recent invention that didn't really exist prior to the 1800s. Michelangelo didn't consider himself as anything other than an interior decorator. In fact, "art" is an abbreviation of "artisan", which is synonymous with "craftsman".
@Frank Fisher: Your broad—and, frankly, insulting—generalisations and descriptions of what you *think* artists do all day do not help your argument. If anything, they undermine it. You accuse the ignorant masses of not realising how much work is involved in programming, yet people are pirating music and movies far more often than software. Do you think a successful blockbuster movie costs pennies to make and is produced by a bunch of lazy good-for-nothings who do little more than "colour in" celluloid frames with crayon? I suspect not. Yet you're including all those people in your crass generalisation.
The fundamental problem is that, without form, there can *be* no function. Similarly, without function, there can be no form. You need BOTH. In equal measure. THAT was, is, and forever will be Apple's "secret sauce". It's not that Jobs *relegated* the technology to second place. It's that Apple *combined* both art and design to produce products that were greater than the sum of their parts.
If you want to know what programmers create when left to their own devices, I give you the GNU / Linux community. Their work does very well in traditionally 'techie' markets, such as servers and embedded platforms, but they have never, ever, managed to make any kind of dent in the *consumer* sector. Why? Because they haven't a bloody clue about consistency and interface design.
Making complex systems easy to interface with is bloody hard work. It is NOT trivial. Apple's approach is that of a painter or sculptor: knowing what to leave *out*. Because the more "stuff" you nail on, the more complicated and scary the customer will think it is. And no amount of advertising will help you there.
Sean, I'd just make a couple of responses to that; firstly, are you really telling me anything more than a tiny percentage of designers are actually artists? I really can't see any definition of 'art' that encompasses "we don't want empty space, we want branding!". I said upthread, I couldn't do that job - sat there at a Mac with some know-nothing account director at your shoulder proding every pixel of 'design'... that ain't art. It CAN be, sure, but how often is it?
UIs - good point, but how it looks is, IMO, trivial compared to how it works, how it *feels*, and that's about the software and, to a greater extent right now, the hardware. They're not called fondleslabs because of how they look.
And criticise Linux... but then what do you say about Ubuntu?
GOOD! THAT IS EXACTLY HOW IT SHOULD BE!
Users don't owe coders appreciation, any more than drivers owe car plant workers appreciation.
Car plant workers/car designers etc. are doing the job they're being paid for PROPERLY if the car doesn't break down, and the driver doesn't have to know everything about what's going on under the hood to make the damn thing go. Drivers just want to get from point A to point B, and THAT IS FINE.
Similarly, coders are doing the job they're being paid for PROPERLY if the software doesn't break down and the user doesn't have to think about the code.
By your own argument, if you don't blueprint your own engines OMG YOU DON'T DESERVE TO DRIVE!
No, dear, coders are not Super Special Snowflakes. Their salaries are ultimately being paid by the users, and they are employed to meet the users' needs. The users care about getting their job done, not about code. Code is your job, not theirs. Deal with it.
"Users don't owe coders appreciation, any more than drivers owe car plant workers appreciation."
What about car /designers/? By which I refer to more than just mere aesthetics but to the sum of the the whole car experience. Appreciated I believe they should be and indeed are! Aren't there television shows that extol those virtues?
So, when can we expect mainstream television series that obsess over well implemented software? No gonna happen due to the Eloi caste's incomprehension of the finer details and their significance :-( Still, it was always going the be that way and anyone in the industry shouldn't really be surprised.
"Developers" aren't appreciated as much as "creatives"? It's been my experience that developers are always paid significantly more than graphic designers or product managers. Many an engineer in our organization has asked about moving over to product management, only to discover they would have to take a pay cut to do so.
Is this supposed to butter up a readership still smarting from Dominic Connor's thrashings? If so, it could use some work.
In particular, the author could distinguish different sorts of design, say the one "make the cover mauve" from the one that draws up UI guidelines. He could also compare the salaries for graphic designer to those for programmers, and make very sure that he's not comparing a PFY PHP newbie to the principal at a design shop. And furthermore,
"Our society is moving from one in which the educated took pride in knowing how the world worked to a more blinkered place; today, it’s about how you feel."
And this would have been when, and for whose definition of educated? if the latter means "having college degrees", perhaps that is so. Yet I can remembers hordes years ago getting the diploma without knowing squat about anything in particular. I didn't go to a great school, but evidence suggests that such things happened elsewhere.
"Granted, in the UK today it's hard to find many under-forties who wouldn't be considered alcoholics in the US..."
Well, if you do your research in pubs I suppose that might be the case. Props to you for an engineer's precision of statement.
"It’s not just about reward – self-perception of status rarely hinges on salary."
Perhaps, but you might want to check with Mr. Connor on this one.
I've been over the years; Code monkey, Network grunt, Sys Admin and a few more swear words besides. What I've learned is this ...
In IT if you've done your job right, you are invisible; If the people up the food chain know you exist it's because you've fucked up.
You are only as good as your last biggest fuckup; The powers that be never remember the 40 hours straight you put in, or the novel solution to whatever the problem of the day was
No they only remember you killed the e-mail server at 9:30 yesterday morning
Infrastructure is boring to most people, they don't care about the effort that goes into roads, water, sewage, ATM's etc; they only care when it doesn't work and when it doesn't work it's all your fault; never mind they would rather spend vast amounts of cash to big up their own glory but never on the infrastructure that keeps them safe happy & warm.
I think Neal Stephenson had it right, Engineers & Scientists are Dwarves and the media studies types are the Elves, they may prance & frolic in the forests & the sunshine; but if you want something done and done right, you hire a Dwarf
I may not have a degree that says engineer on it; I've just been doing it for 20+ years
Fook me, a dozen or so paragraphs of piteously whining dork bleating about how creative he thinks he is. You're a bricklayer, nothing more. Sure there's good and bad ones and the good ones are worth more than the bad ones but in the end you work to other people's designs and build other people's buildings.
If you had any creative talent you'd be an architect.
There's no icon for something this tragic ..
#1 An acquaintance, who only briefly pursued a coding career, said it best:
"It's a rush to be solving puzzles all day for a living".
#2 I would probably be happy doing what I do for less pay, if that is what the market offered. Shhhh... don't tell my employer. As it is, the market rate does pay rather well.
Less so than the average wanker in an investment bank, but so be it.
I don't feel particularly ill-treated in my place in society. Sure, won't pick up too many girls quoting Python design patterns, but otherwise... lots of people hate their career, not just their current employer. I am happy with what I do and I suspect the better programmers are those who enjoy their work.
Oh, and I call myself a programmer. Not a software engineer, developer, etc... Joe Average understands "programmer" just fine and inflated titles do seem rather whiny to me.
Who, exactly, is out there making a serious, substantive claim that coders aren't creative? I think all the academic work on the subject that I've seen (and that's quite a lot) acknowledges, and in many cases analyzes in some detail, the creative aspects of writing software.
I don't know who's torqued Fisher's unmentionables on this, but my suspicion is that it's no one worth listening to - much less waxing bathetic (and, as other commentators have noted, occasionally offensive) about.
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