It's not possible to be a "productive" musician on a traditional instrument (i.e. excluding iPads) without knowing how to play scales, chords, etc.
That’s demands for faster delivery of software and ridiculous demands on user experience.
Does looking down on higher level devs make you feel superior or something like that?
Absolutely not. It's about bloat. Many times people "just want to code" or eschew optimizing repeating the mantra that "premature optimization is the root of all evil" that you often end up with bloated software.
As someone who has played guitar on and off for years as a hobby, I'm shocked by how much harder it is than programming.
I can pick up almost any random codebase on GitHub, and as long as they use libraries and don't touch low level stuff, I can probably start working with it in 10 minutes to a day at most.
Then, I could leave that project for a year and be almost as productive as when I left. So much of the action is on the screen, not in the head, and there's no muscle memory required.
If any instrument was as easy as coding... I think a lot of coders might have music careers instead....
They do make idiot managers happy though, because look at all those features and scrum points they “finished!” That’s why armies of them will always be there in the software ecosystem, blithely and ignorantly a net drain on whatever unlucky company is currently employing them, busily making a mess for more diligent programmers to clean up for the rest of eternity. It’s called “job security.”
No, it's like recognizing that an orchestra conductor doesn't need to play every instrument (or even any instrument!) in order to make music.
Or alternatively, that a violin player doesn't need to understand the physics of acoustic dispersion in order to be the best in the world at playing the violin.
Also, I don’t think you’ll find a single conductor on this planet who is not skilled in at least one instrument. Terrible analogy.
We learn the high level practical behaviour of devices: resistors, capacitors, BJT and MOSFET transistors, opamps, logic gates, etc in 2nd year. What we learn there is enough to be an effective practical circuit designer.
We also dive deep into how that stuff works under the hood. One course I remember fondly started the first lecture with “This course is called semiconductor physics. To understand semiconductor physics you need to understand solid state physics. To understand solid state physics, you need to understand quantum mechanics. We have a lot of material to cover so let’s get started.” A similar course was Electric and Magnetic Fields, where we spent a ton of time applying vector calculus to situations of varying complexity to get a better understanding of how the things we learned in 2nd year actually work and some of the limitations that you wouldn’t pick up on from the practical (generally first-order) models.
You don’t get to graduate with an EE degree without learning this stuff. And in my mind, that stuff is like a mixture of data structures, runtime complexity, assembler, and cache coherency. Fundamental understanding that while you won’t use directly in your day-to-day work but underpins everything you do.
That’s all kind of missing the point though. This whole thread has been a discussion about whether Software Engineers need to get down into the nitty gritty low-level stuff. My take is absolutely yes. You might not use it directly every day, but you’ll make consistently better design decisions if you really feel it in your bones. Over on the electrical engineering side of the world you don’t get to graduate without that background understanding. In the software engineering world some people seem to take pride in their ignorance of the foundations they’re building in; in my 20-ish years of experience, those people often end up building things that work poorly and they don’t have the background understanding needed to fix it.
Ok, this is clearly a side-topic AND at the risk of being pedantic: Is this actually true?
Like, I can see how theoretically one could learn to sight-read music well enough to be able to direct an orchestra of individual musicians, then do enough ear-training to identify enough notes to keep tabs on everyone (especially if you're conducting a high school or (god help you :) ) middle school orchestra), etc, etc.
But does anyone actually do that? Has anyone ever done that?
"I'm going to learn how to conduct an orchestra without learning any instruments" kinda feels like "I'm going to become a software engineer using an LLM instead of learning any foundations)"
(To be clear - the LLM path might be viable in the future, possibly the near future, but at least today it's not quite there. My apologies in advance if my analogy doesn't work in the future :) )
A conductor should have a deep understanding of music, theory, and rehearsal pedagogy. At least in current western schools of music I don't see how you would explore these topics outside of the study of an instrument. Maybe there is some esoteric path to this; I just can't imagine how you go to Berklee and begin to explore the nuances of a composition without ever engaging with it as an instrumentalist.
On top of that, the conductor isn't just engaged at performances, they're also responsible for leading rehearsals. If they've never deliberate practiced the learning of music from an instrumentalist perspective I think they would be very hard-pressed to structure strategies for getting the larger group to a high level.
There is at least one (so I'm speculating he's not the only one, but it is likely to be rare) proficient conductor (Leopold Stokowski) who had no real proficiency with any instrument but he did have some very rudimentary piano training... and then pretty much taught himself conducting. Whether that rudimentary piano ability counts as "play an instrument"
"He studied at the Royal College of Music, where he first enrolled in 1896 at the age of thirteen, making him one of the youngest students to do so. In his later life in the United States, Stokowski would perform six of the nine symphonies composed by his fellow organ student Ralph Vaughan Williams. Stokowski sang in the choir of the St Marylebone Parish Church, and later he became the assistant organist to Sir Walford Davies at The Temple Church. By age 16, Stokowski was elected to membership of the Royal College of Organists. In 1900, he formed the choir of St. Mary's Church, Charing Cross Road, where he trained the choirboys and played the organ. In 1902, he was appointed the organist and choir director of St. James's Church, Piccadilly. He also attended The Queen's College, Oxford, where he earned a Bachelor of Music degree in 1903" [1]
That sounds like a bit more than rudimentary piano training to me :)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leopold_Stokowski#Early_life
i heard this before and it seemed dubious to me
on investigating, it turned out that there were literally zero famous orchestra conductors who don't know how to play any instruments. most of them know how to play numerous instruments and do so in their spare time, though there were one or two who had stopped. from my experience with musicians i think it's likely that they could play any conventional orchestra instrument after a short exploration period, even if they don't have documented histories of playing it
i suspect that this is true of non-famous orchestra conductors as well, but i could only find public information about the famous ones
of course that doesn't prove anything about programming, which is not the same skill as playing a musical instrument or conducting an orchestra, but it does show that you're constructing your arguments without much concern for veracity