I originally taught myself HTML, as a teenager, approx 16 years ago. The web was a continuing interest in the following years and the work of people like Joshua Davis, Daniel Brown and Yugo Nakamura was a significant inspiration.
After graduating I was looking for work and found plenty of demand for the basic web design and development skills I'd been gradually acquiring as a hobby over the preceding years. Consequently, I started dedicating significant time to improving my programming skills and establishing my career as a developer.
Similar to the comments of others on this thread, I've found the key benefits of my arts background to be schooling in:
- critical thinking
- communication
- visual / aesthetic fluency
Two notable differences I've found between the two fields:
1. STEM vs humanities
Currently, developers often tend to have a science / mathematics background or an affinity with those disciplines. Work that is often considered most effective in the arts is ambiguous and open to multiple interpretations. This is quite a cultural difference from the empirical search for knowledge in the sciences or the eternal truths of mathematics.
2. Social status
The respect accorded to developers in comparison to the majority of professionals of the visual art world (artists, curators, educators etc) is extraordinary. Societies frequently don't seem to know what the purpose of art really is, especially given that the arts often have an obtuse or outright critical relationship to capitalism. Developers, as the key technicians of the information economy, in contrast typically receive a great deal of autonomy, prestige and financial reward for their work.