Great Engineers are Also Artists. “I characterize art as something that is done for its own sake, and done well, and often creates a sense of beauty or some strong emotion. And a lot of engineers are introverts. As an aside, I hate the term “incel.” It’s just a way of putting introverts down. It’s the new “nerd,” if you will. If someone says that somebody is an incel, I’m more likely to want to interview them. So let’s move away from the slurs. But introverts tend to want to express themselves through other things rather than going out and expressing themselves directly. So what are they going to do? They’re going to express themselves through their craft. They’re going to create art. In my current company, at least half the engineers have serious artwork they’ve done on the side. World-class artwork—everything from elegant mathematical proofs to beautiful computer art, to literally sculpting things with clay, designing clothing, designing doorknobs, water bottles. There’s one who’s done incredible music videos, really good stuff. And I see a lot of the better engineers tinker with the AI art products, much more so than even so-called artists do. I think a lot of artists are scared by AI art products saying, “This is going to replace me.” Whereas someone who doesn’t have that identity of an artist and doesn’t feel threatened by it—it’s just a tool and they try it out to see what it can create. Anything done for its own sake and done as well as one possibly can is art. And great engineers are also artists. They’re capable of anything. It’s just they’ve chosen to be engineers and focused on building things because engineering is the ability to turn your ideas and your art into things that actually work, that do something useful, that embody some knowledge in a way that it can be repeated and people can get utility out of it. But that doesn’t mean that it can’t be beautiful.”