art vs. engineering

[wjl]

I've been thinking a lot lately about the contrast between art and engineering.  I don't, of course, necessarily think the two are opposed, and i don't mean to cast any value judgments about one over the other, but it's been an interesting dichotomy to consider applying analogically to my current life status and future goals

Comments

[lindseykuper]

Before I started grad school, my job was to do Perl plumbing to support the creation of online textbooks and and supplemental course materials. Basically, it was about slurping data in from various XML (and almost-XML (...I don't want to talk about it)) sources and spitting it out again in a certain proprietary database serialization file format that we had to reverse-engineer. My team and I wrote tools to do this stuff. The rest of company, even my direct supervisor, didn't really care about whether our code was good, or even to what extent we wrote code at all; they just wanted the products that they would sell. (Before I was hired, they outsourced the work to a company that manually imported things into the database one by one.) On the other hand, at the end there wasn't really anything that I could especially point to and say, "There, that; I made that!", because the part that I did was so unspecific to any particular product. So, in a way, it was the worst of both worlds: not only was the process not valuable to them, but there wasn't even any product that I could really call mine.

In grad school, my job is to produce papers and eventually a dissertation. The process matters a lot, as you pointed out, but there's also something I can point to at the end that's mine. So it's the best of both worlds, for me.

Perhaps a worthwhile question to ask oneself about the organization one works for is, "If they could replace me with a machine that would do this job perfectly, would they?" I'm afraid that under capitalism, the answer is most often yes. It was certainly the case at my old job. Grad school, at least, is a brief reprieve from that.

[wjl]

It's an interesting point you make about bring replaced by machines. One standard response to "machines destroying jobs, oh no!" is that in a true techno-utopia, people whose jobs get automated become free to pursue whatever creative or artistic endeavors they really want to pursue. Thinking about that made me wonder what creative or artistic endeavors *i* would pursue if given the opportunity, since I don't really think of myself as an artist, but reflecting back on my grad school experience, I realized that doing undirected research is a kind of art for me..

I don't think I'm really adding much to what you said here, but it is interesting to me to see the discussion come full circle back to what got me thinking initially..

Anyway, enjoy the grad school experience :)