This post is about something I have noticed regarding freelance workers in the games industry in particular. I have often seen personal websites, blogs, and forums posts in which artists and programmers advertise their work, and, at least in the field of game design and freelance coding and graphic design, I think in many ways artists have an advantage over programmers.

This is simply because even a lay person can appreciate a good quality model or graphic, without having to know anything about how it was made. Furthermore, it takes only a second to determine if the work is of a professional standard or not, allowing a potential employer who might be browsing to instantly decide if this person is worth contacting or not.

In contrast, it is not nearly as easily for a programmer to advertise code. Most obviously, it takes a programmer to appreciate computer code. To a non-programmer, or possibly even to a programmer not familiar with this language, or this program, the code would make no sense at all. Since many, or even most, employers have a business background as opposed to a technical background, this can result in a lot of promising programmers being overlooked.

Additionally, a complex computer program can often be thousands of lines of code long, and would take a non-trivial investment of time for another programmer to understand and appreciate the work that went into writing that code. This means that a potential employer would have to consciously spend time and effort reviewing the code, which they are not likely to do while they are simply browsing the web.

Finally, computer code *is* a product, and, if you advertise source code, someone could easily steal it, rewrite it so that it is slightly different, and use it as their own. This can be very difficult to detect, much less to prove. You cannot do this with screenshots of a 3d model, or with a low-resolution, watermarked sample of a 2d graphic (Although artists do still have problems with stolen art).

Unless a programmer is working with something that can produce an interesting, eye-catching screenshot, like fractals (which I have always had an appreciation for) or possibly shaders, or directX or openGL projects, they going to have to rely on text descriptions or log files, which don't have nearly the same eye-grabbing appeal as a good-quality graphic, and that can only hurt their ability to get freelance contracts.

What makes this even more frustrating, especially for me, is when a programmer uses "programmer art", very basic art used as a placeholder to test or show off the functionality of a program. Many people judge the programmer by the quality of the art, completely missing the whole point of the project. Compared to the work produced by a professional artist, programmer art is, of course, going to be quite poor.

There are other ways for a programmer to advertise their skills, for example by helping others on a message forum, and gradually becoming recognised for that over time, but in general I think it is more difficult for a programmer to show off their skills.