I'm mostly joking, but painting is difficult mental labor. It requires an enormous amount of mental and physical control.
Most people when seeing my paintings are quite surprised to find out I rarely sell them. It's because as soon as I try to professionalize that part of my career I have to change what I'm doing to fit a market, and I hate everyone else's taste but my own.
P.S. some of my paintings can be found at https://lnsy.studio, but mostly I write software for organizations that work on dealing with the climate crisis.
I started drawing as a hobby when I burned out in my academic career some years ago. I don't think I'm any good at it, but every once in a while I get an offer to do paid artwork. So far I declined all of them because I felt that would make me lose the relaxing escape from my day job.
Painting can be very frustrating. Usually the process goes like this: you want to achieve something, you try for dozens of hours, the result doesn't look nearly as good as you hoped, and you have only vaguest ideas on how to make it better on the next attempt. You basically need to love the process and not the results, as the results are going to suck for the first 10 years.
Programming, which purely follows logic, is much less frustrating for people for whom logic is their primary mode of functioning.
I couldn't disagree more. You can have both kinds in both fields. Regular straightforward coding or discovery coding. I'm currently trying to derive a timeout monad, I have no clue how and trying hours of dead ends before starting from scratch.
It hurts but it's my own pain. I decide how much, the kind, the time...
In it jobs, social interactions cause so much friction, information uncertainty, bad dependencies .. it adds to the raw effort.
That said it also helps avoiding rabbit holes too deep.
Programmers who escape programming are sort of yearning for the physical labor and physical effort and physical tirdeness that comes with it. We're kind of designed for that sort of work.
People who enjoy programming and long stretches of mental exercise are rare, and have been rare throughout history.
Random thought: I escaped restaurant/factory work and got into tech and man I hated those days. Standing there cutting an endless river of chicken in the factory light... I felt like I was going to go insane. Now it's like I'm working till 9PM not something to be proud of but it's less trading hours of life for money, it still is but feels less so. At the end of the day I am fortunate I have personal interests like robotics that I can get into because it's cool.
I didn't get into tech by a boot camp or something I was originally in phys/eng but picked up building LAMP websites on the side. Took me like 3-5 years before I actually made money from writing code.
I came from janitorial work and temping. I am forever grateful for what programming has given me -- especially these days, where I make enough to live on and get to work on meaningful projects.
An aside, but I am truly concerned that our path from working to professional class via tech work is closing up behind us.
I think the key is the understanding that programmers are are properly paid for their work, and now we need to make sure teachers, janitors and garbage men and the like get to have good, stable lives. And yes, I think janitors and garbage men should make as much as programmers.
I retired this year after 4 decades of writing code; now I write code to make art (in addition to other digital painting and effects). The code is actually much harder than anything I ever did before since I don't use other people's tools but make my own, but way more fun since its what I want to do, not what someone else wants. Programming without meetings or JIRA or stupid processes or politics or impossible deadlines/requirements or anything is so much better. Becoming successful as an artist is even harder than programming, that's still WIP.
Probably not art painting but rather interior paining and/or exterior staining. It is lot of physical work and the long term health outcomes (unless you are religious about wearing a respirator) aren't great.
Speaking as a professional artist, art can burn you out just as surely as programming can. Just try painting six novel paintings a month for a couple of years.
Most people when seeing my paintings are quite surprised to find out I rarely sell them. It's because as soon as I try to professionalize that part of my career I have to change what I'm doing to fit a market, and I hate everyone else's taste but my own.
P.S. some of my paintings can be found at https://lnsy.studio, but mostly I write software for organizations that work on dealing with the climate crisis.