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Comment by DrewADesign | Hacker News Reader

Vindictive? Artists? BS. You're clearly extrapolating on an unfounded assumption. I'm an adult art student getting a BFA as part of a career change and have known hundreds of artists and designers over the years. Firstly, there is no unifying culture among even large subsets of artists, let alone artists in general. Secondly, claiming that artists in general are vindictive is flat-out absurd.

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At a certain type of design-centric company the culture shifts, and divas are both created and elevated to a degree that you don't see elsewhere. Most companies don't tolerate that sort of artist/designer because they're obnoxious and generally horrible people (and they don't work well with others so unless the culture is one that prioritizes them over everyone else they tend to flail and fail pretty quickly) but here and there you'll find pockets where they thrive.

I think you're absolutely right that in general artists are not like that. It's a few bad apples, and for the most part they don't ever have much opportunity to do damage because it takes an exceptionally weird company to enable them.

Well aware of the conspicuous minority that comprise that (stereo)type, but you can levy similar charges against any knowledge job from engineering to academia to the priesthood and I highly doubt those sorts of people are more highly represented in art than most other professions.

I took it to mean artists/designers in a corporate setting where it's a bit more cutthroat.

Beyond never having heard anyone conflate the terms 'artist' and 'corporate designer,' the sentiment would still be wrong. I've worked in corporate software projects as a developer, designer, support person, project manager, QA engineer, and even IT/Ops guy and would rank designers, on a whole, somewhere near last in terms of likeliness to be vindictive. Sales? Management? Even support? Sure.

You can have vindictive jerks in any job, but considering that design's fundamental purpose is to empathize with people and manifest that it some medium, vindictive people tend to filter themselves out.

More likely to be the corporate setting than the designers.

I had no idea the originator of the Bondi Blue iMac was Danny Coster. I'd always assumed it wss Ive.

Interesting he managed to take all of the credit for it.

From the media you’d think he and Steve Jobs were the only two employees and responsible for 100% of any success.

It’s much easier to personify a monolith under a specific individual. Tesla is only Musk. Gas prices and inflation are only because of Biden. The list goes on.

I think you really captured the somewhat unspoken reality of it.. When you are a leader, things that go right are credited to you (Jobs, Musk) but when things go wrong, you get the blame (Biden).

Of course the world is more nuanced than that but the power of narrative combined with the romance of “leadership” and you end up playing a high-risk, high-reward game

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