I was raised a lit and music nerd, then staggered into CS in college because it was a creative discipline that could pay bills.

Twenty years down the pike I've gotten pretty solid at programming, certainly not genius-level but competent.

I agree strongly that making art anyone cares anout is massively harder than being a competent programmer. In both you need strong technical abilities to be effective, but intuition and a deep grasp of human psychology are really crucial in art - almost table stakes.

Because software dev is usually practical, a craft, you can get paid decently with far less brilliance and fire than will suffice to make an artist profitable.

...though perhaps the DNN code assist tools will change that soon.