Jeff Atwood posed the age-old question again today on his blog, and I thought it was worth a little more introspection as someone who was (is?) a musician first, programmer second.
The question: “Why are so many programmers musicians?” (Note: the question is coming from a programmer, not a musician, which is the first notable point. Many programmers might fancy themselves musicians, but it’s highly doubtful that a proportionately high number of musical performers write code offstage.)
REAL ARTISTS SHIP
Sure, both musicians and programmers create and release things, but we never really give either group full credit for how inherent this release cycle is to their jobs. Simply put, if you’ve written code but have never compiled a self-created working program of some kind, you wouldn’t call yourself a programmer. Likewise, you’re not a musician if you’ve never played a song.
This point is almost so obvious it’s ridiculous to waste time on, but think of all the people you know who have jobs that could go on for fifty years without a tangible “thing” being created. Most people I know who input data into spreadsheets, make photocopies, wait tables, count money, deliver newspapers, or sit in meetings throughout their day could do so from early adulthood to retirement and never build anything.
The real reason our hearts flutter a little bit when we hear the words “real artists ship” is because it’s fundamentally true (because you fundamentally can’t be a real artist without having shipped something), and also because we know that a vastly disproportionate number of all the people we’ve ever met in our lifetimes we’ll never ship anything.
The point being that if you limit the input to only people who ship stuff, you’re immediately going to see an overlap from there on.
LOUD == POPULAR
Let’s face it. Becoming popular–at least to an extent–as either a musician or a programmer has less to do with personal branding or even (dare I say it) skill as much as it does with just being louder than everybody else. It might not make you the best or the most world-famous, but you can still pretty much guarantee in the fields of music and software that as long as you’re loud enough you’ll get noticed and followed to one degree or another.
Just ask these guys:
GOING NICHE FOR PROFIT
Both musicians and programmers are raised with a similar value set. Learn the tools that are valued, get a job using said tools, profit. So of course the most unbearably boring, untalented, and uninspired losers in both fields do just that. They study CompSci or Classical Performance, learn java or the violin, and get a job in a big office building or junior high school. It’s safe, it’s secure, and it’s a no-brainer.
On the other hand you’ve got the true hacker types who realize and value success a little differently. These are the programmers who give up Java for Ruby after college, or the musicians who drop out of college entirely and bend circuits.
The irony is that the more niche you go with your career, the higher your chance of success. Right now there are a million people hoping to be a successful rapper or pop singer, and probably 200 trying to be successful power electronics musicians.
And of course since even the average musician listens to more music than they write, the demand for strange genres like power electronics rises disproportionately. If you’re able to become one of the top 20 of the total 200 power electronics musicians, you’ve found yourself in the top 10% internationally.
Obviously the same goes for programmers.
Just as in DHH’s concept of the ’surplus’ and Giles Bowkett’s idea of the ‘fringe’, as a musician or a programmer you have the ability to carve out a niche to be successful in, which is very powerful even if by the simple mathematics of “fish in the pond” numbers.
Certainly every career you can think of has its niches and maybe I’m overdoing it a bit, but I think this is a huge draw for musicians and programmers to their fields (and to the place where you can successfully be both). While I’m sure most advertisers and marketers are still working offline, I would highly doubt that specializing in “social media” as a marketer could automatically bump you to the top 10% internationally in your field, or specializing in Japanese used car sales, or kangaroo veterinary medicine, or Laffy Taffy humor writing, etc, etc, etc.
Noise musician or Merb contributor? LOL DUNNO.
SO WHAT?
The percentage of musicians who consider themselves programmers is very low. Even if it would make perfect sense thematically for him to knock out a Perl script from time to time, I’ve never seen William Basinski make a contribution to Open Source or Prurient write a badass Lisp compiler.
But there are way more “musicians” (or people who call themselves musicians) than there are “programmers” (the same).
The percentage of programmers who consider themselves musicians, all else considered, is disproportionately high.
This is for a bazillion trillion reasons, probably, but has everything to do with the specific personality traits that would draw someone to proramming in the first place.
Again, all else considered, if you consider these personality traits:
- Builds and releases “real” stuff
- Understands the value of “loudness” as personal branding
- Able to learn new things
- Sees the “niche” or “fringe” as dollar signs, and, oh yeah,
- Can actually write fucking computer code
You’re already down to a tiny fraction of a tiny fraction of the world’s population. If we were to graph all of these people to the left side of a Venn diagram, and all the people who have points 1-4 in their personality but change point 5 to “can actually play a fucking instrument” to the right, the amount of overlap would be so absurd and intense that you’d think we were graphing the same group.
Oh wait, we pretty much are, and that’s exactly the point.
