Artists
vs. Programmers
The unsung hero of this Roundtable
was my partner, Bill McCloskey. Bill is an artist (he's now SGI's VRML
Evangelist) so he made the perfect counterpart to me, a programmer.
If we got good rating it's because of Bill; the bad ratings are mine.
We came up with the idea for this RT at the last CGDC while sitting
in bar waiting for the next session to start. The purpose was to explore
the relationship between artists and programmers on a team by starting
with the stereotypes each group has for the other and then working toward
common ground.
We started each RT by going around the table and having everyone identify
who they were and whether they were artists or programmers. It was interesting
to note that the sessions were at least 2:1 artists over programmers.
Then Bill would start by pointing out that, although the round table
was our joint idea, only my name appeared on the program because, as
usual, the programmer hogged all the credit (he made it clear that he
was kidding). Then he'd get the ball rolling by asking about some stereotype
that artists have about programmers. We'd talk about that for a bit
and then I'd ask about artists from the programmer side.
The various sessions were all different but came fairly quickly to the
same conclusion: that you need a great deal of communication and cooperation
between the artists and the programmers. We always got very quickly
past the stereotypes and into discussions of cooperation strategies.
Both Bill and I found this a very effective format. We're considering
doing more of these discussions in other venues. And we're thinking
about doing another talk next year.
