The Best Engineers Are Artists

I’ve been a bassist for most of my life.

Not the kind who noodles around at home sometimes and tells people at parties that he “plays a little bass.” I mean the kind who shows up early to rehearsal, who loses track of time working through a progression, who hears a song on the radio and instinctively listens to what the bass is doing underneath everything else. When someone asks me about it, I don’t call it a hobby. Hobbies are things you do to kill time. Bass is something that shaped how I think.

And here’s the thing I didn’t expect: it also made me a better engineer.

Not in some vague, hand-wavy “creativity is good” way. In specific, concrete ways that I can point to every time I sit down to build something. The instincts I developed playing bass — listening before acting, serving the whole instead of showing off, knowing when not to play — are the same instincts that separate engineers who build things that work from engineers who build things that sing.

The best engineers I’ve ever worked with think like artists. And there’s substantial research suggesting this connection runs deep — in ways that should make every business owner and every engineer pay attention.

Playing for the Song

Here’s the first thing you learn as a bassist: it’s not about you.

The guitarist gets the solos. The singer gets the spotlight. The drummer gets to hit things. The bassist’s job is to make all of them sound better. You’re the bridge between rhythm and melody — the connective tissue that holds the whole thing together. And the moment you start playing for yourself instead of the song, everyone notices. Not because you’re too loud, but because something just feels wrong. The groove falls apart. The song loses its center.

Great engineering works exactly the same way. The best engineers don’t write code to demonstrate how clever they are. They write code that serves the user, the team, and the system. Code that’s so well-crafted, you barely notice it — like a bass line that locks in so perfectly, you’d only realize it was there if it stopped.

I’ve seen both kinds. The engineer who builds an elaborate abstraction layer because it’s technically interesting, even though the problem called for ten lines of straightforward code. And the engineer who writes those ten lines — clear, readable, obviously correct — and moves on. The second engineer is playing for the song.

This isn’t just an aesthetic preference. McKinsey studied 300 publicly listed companies over five years and found that companies in the top quartile of their Design Index — companies that embedded this “serve the user” thinking into their culture — saw 32% higher revenue growth and 56% higher total returns to shareholders compared to their industry peers. Playing for the song isn’t just good craft. It’s good business.

The Pocket

Musicians talk about “the pocket.” It’s when the rhythm section locks in — bass and drums breathing together, every note landing exactly where it should. When you’re in the pocket, playing feels effortless. The audience can’t explain why the music sounds so good, but they can feel it. It’s not about technical precision. A metronome is precise. The pocket is something deeper — it’s feel, it’s taste, it’s the accumulated instinct of thousands of hours of playing.

Engineering has its own version of the pocket. It’s the difference between a system that works and a system that feels right. The API that’s intuitive to use before you read the docs. The interface that guides you without you realizing it. The architecture that’s simple enough to explain on a whiteboard but flexible enough to handle everything you throw at it. When an engineer has taste — when they’ve developed that instinct for what belongs and what doesn’t — the things they build just feel better. You can’t always articulate why. But you can feel it.

Some people dismiss this as aesthetic fluff. “Does it work or doesn’t it?” But the data says taste pays — and pays big. The Design Management Institute tracked design-driven companies over ten years and found they outperformed the S&P 500 by 228%. Not 28%. Two hundred twenty-eight percent. These weren’t companies that happened to make pretty products. They were companies where design thinking — taste, craft, the instinct for what feels right — was embedded in how they operated.

Forrester studied IBM’s design thinking practice and found a 301% ROI over three years. Teams using design thinking got products to market twice as fast and saw up to 75% reduction in time for specific design and development activities. Not because they were cutting corners, but because taste — knowing what to build and how it should feel — eliminates the wasted cycles you burn when you’re guessing.

The pocket isn’t a nice-to-have. It’s a competitive advantage.

Knowing When Not to Play

The hardest lesson in bass isn’t learning what to play. It’s learning what not to play.

Every bassist goes through a phase where they want to fill every space. More notes, more complexity, more proof that they belong on stage. And every bassist eventually learns — usually by listening to the greats — that the space between the notes is what gives music its power. James Jamerson, who by some counts played on more number-one hits than the Beatles, Elvis, and the Rolling Stones combined, was famous for leaving room. His lines were deceptively simple. What made them genius was everything he chose to leave out.

In engineering, this is the principle of restraint. YAGNI — You Aren’t Gonna Need It. The discipline to build what’s needed and nothing more. The wisdom to look at a feature list and say, “We shouldn’t build half of this.” The artist-engineer knows that every line of code is a liability. Every feature is a maintenance burden. Every clever abstraction is a thing someone else has to understand. The art isn’t in adding more — it’s in finding the essential and cutting everything else.

The best engineers live this. They push back on bloated requirements. They delete code that isn’t earning its keep. They resist the urge to add “just one more feature” because they know that every addition is also a subtraction — of clarity, of maintainability, of the user’s ability to understand what they’re looking at.

The companies that master restraint build things that endure. The companies that don’t? They drown in their own complexity, and when the music changes, they can’t adapt because they’re buried under the weight of every note they refused to leave out.

Hearing the Key Change

Restraint isn’t just about what you build. It’s about knowing when the song has changed — and having the creative vision to play something new.

The graveyard of technology companies is full of technically excellent organizations that couldn’t hear the key change. Not because their engineers weren’t talented, but because the companies lacked the artistic instinct to reimagine what they were playing.

Kodak employed world-class engineers. They held over 7,000 patents. One of their own engineers, Steven Sasson, invented the first digital camera in 1975. Management buried it because it didn’t fit their existing business model. The band had a musician who heard the key change — and the rest of the group told him to keep playing the old song. Kodak filed for bankruptcy in 2012.

BlackBerry held roughly 50% of the US smartphone market at its peak. Its devices were technically superior for email and security. But Apple wasn’t playing the same song. While BlackBerry kept advertising specifications, Apple marketed a vision — a device that was a camera, a music player, a web browser, and a phone all at once. The engineers at BlackBerry were excellent. What was missing was the creative instinct to hear that the whole genre had shifted.

Nokia’s hardware engineers were among the best in the world. The company clung to Symbian — a technically capable but clunky operating system — because it was theirs and they knew it. By the time they adopted Windows Phone, iOS and Android had already won. Not because they were technically superior in every dimension, but because they were designed for the song the market was now playing.

In each case, the technical talent was there. What was missing was the artist’s instinct — the ability to step back, hear that the music has changed, and start playing something new before the audience walks out.

The Band Is a System

A band isn’t just a collection of musicians in the same room. It’s a system. Every member is listening to every other member, adapting in real time, improvising within a shared structure. The drummer adjusts when the singer holds a note longer than expected. The guitarist changes voicings to give the vocalist more room. The bassist feels the drummer’s kick pattern shift and locks in with it before either of them has consciously decided to change anything. It’s coordinated, responsive, and — when it works — greater than the sum of its parts.

The best engineering teams operate the same way. Not as a collection of individual contributors who happen to share a Jira board, but as an ensemble. Each person listens to what the others are building. The architecture emerges from collaboration, not from one person’s blueprint handed down from on high. When something changes — a requirement shifts, a constraint surfaces — the team adapts together, like musicians following each other through an unplanned key change.

The companies that understand this — that treat engineering as a creative, collaborative discipline rather than an assembly line — build things people love.

Ed Catmull co-invented texture mapping and earned a PhD in computer science. Then he built Pixar, a company defined by the integration of art and engineering at every level. Pixar’s “Braintrust” model didn’t separate the artists from the technicians — it put them in the same room and expected everyone to speak up. Animators challenged rendering engineers. Engineers pushed back on story decisions. The director held final creative authority, but the process was collaborative in a way that most tech companies would find uncomfortable. The result: dozens of Academy Awards, consistent box-office dominance across two decades, and — critically — technical breakthroughs that emerged because the artists kept asking for things the engineers hadn’t thought to build yet. Catmull’s insight was that great technology serves great art, and the organizational structure has to make them inseparable.

Brian Chesky earned a BFA in Industrial Design from the Rhode Island School of Design before co-founding Airbnb. When the company needed to rethink its customer experience, Chesky didn’t commission a market analysis. He hired a Pixar animator to storyboard the entire customer journey — 45 touchpoints across host and guest experiences, inspired by Disney’s Snow White storyboarding process. The storyboards didn’t contain a single line of code or a single wireframe. They were drawings of how a guest feels when they arrive at a stranger’s apartment for the first time. How a host feels when they hand over their keys. That creative reframe — thinking in feelings rather than features — triggered what the company called its most aggressive period of growth. Steve Jobs made the same point more directly: “Technology alone is not enough — it’s technology married with liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields us the results that make our heart sing.”

The band plays better when everyone in it is both an artist and a technician. The companies that figure this out don’t just build products. They build movements.

The Whole-Brain Advantage

So why does this connection keep showing up? Why does artistic practice correlate so strongly with high-level scientific and engineering achievement?

The most striking research comes from Michigan State University. Robert Root-Bernstein and colleagues studied the avocations of Nobel laureates, National Academy members, Royal Society members, and compared them to typical scientists and the general public. The findings were staggering:

• Nobel Prize winners are 22 times more likely than typical scientists to perform, sing, or act
• 12 times more likely to write fiction, poetry, or plays
• 7 times more likely to practice visual arts — drawing, painting, sculpting
• 5 times more likely to engage in crafting, woodworking, or mechanics

Not slightly more likely. Orders of magnitude more likely. And a 2023 follow-up study found evidence that this isn’t incidental — polymathy is a deliberate creative strategy. The best scientists purposely cultivate artistic skills because doing so builds the mental infrastructure that makes breakthrough thinking possible.

This tracks with what we know about how the brain works. Research on music training — including a 1997 study on keyboard instruction — has found that sustained musical practice can enhance spatial-temporal reasoning: the ability to visualize and manipulate patterns over time, which is exactly what engineering demands. Research on engineering education has identified divergent thinking — the ability to generate multiple solutions to a single problem — as essential for engineering graduates, a finding consistent with priorities outlined by the National Academy of Engineering. And divergent thinking is precisely what artistic practice develops. You don’t get better at seeing multiple solutions by solving more problems the same way. You get better by painting, by writing, by playing bass — by training your mind to explore rather than converge.

This is the mechanism behind the observation I made in The Creativity Gap: when I asked people in tech whether they did anything artistic or creative outside of work, the answer was almost always nothing. And those same people were the ones who couldn’t figure out what to do with AI beyond “make my emails faster.” The Harvard Business Review research on AI and metacognition pointed to the same thing — the differentiator wasn’t technical skill, it was the ability to plan, monitor, and refine your own thinking process. That’s what artistic practice builds. Not creativity in the abstract. Metacognition. The ability to think about thinking.

The Creativity Gap, Up Close

In The Creativity Gap, we made the macro argument: roughly 80% of companies using AI report no measurable improvement in productivity, and the bottleneck isn’t the technology — it’s creative capacity. This article is the individual-level version of the same argument.

The companies in those statistics aren’t failing because they hired bad engineers. They’re failing because they hired engineers who only know how to engineer — who can solve any problem you put in front of them but can’t see problems that haven’t been defined yet. They can execute specs brilliantly but can’t question whether the spec is right. They can optimize what exists but can’t imagine what should exist instead.

The engineer-artist — the one who practices creative thinking as a discipline, not as an occasional spark of inspiration — brings something fundamentally different. They bring taste. They bring the instinct to ask “should we?” before “can we?” They bring the ability to hold ambiguity, to sit with a problem that doesn’t have a clean specification, and find the shape of the solution through exploration rather than analysis alone.

If you’re a business owner choosing who builds your systems — whether that’s an internal hire, a contractor, or a consultancy — look for the artist. Ask what they do outside of work. Ask what they’re passionate about, not just what they’re proficient at. The answer will tell you more about the quality of work they’ll produce than their resume ever will.

And if you’re an engineer reading this: pick up an instrument. Open a sketchbook. Write something that isn’t documentation. Not as a hobby. As a practice. As a deliberate strategy for getting better at the thing you already do — the same strategy that Nobel laureates have been using for generations.

The Song Matters

At Moser Research, this is how we think about building. The systems we design for clients aren’t just functional — we want them to feel right. That instinct — taste, craft, playing for the song — is what we mean when we talk about building things with care.

If the creativity gap is the macro challenge, this is the micro answer: cultivate the artist in yourself or in the people you hire, and the quality of everything you build changes. The technology works the same for everyone. What you bring to it is what makes the difference.

The notes matter. The spaces between them matter more. And the best work happens when you stop trying to prove how good you are and start playing for the song.

Let’s talk about what you’re building.

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This post references publicly available research including Root-Bernstein et al. (2008, 2023) on scientific avocations and polymathy, McKinsey’s Design Index study (2018, n=300 companies), the Design Management Institute’s Design Value Index (2015), Forrester’s Total Economic Impact study of IBM Design Thinking (2018), and Rauscher et al. (1997) on music training and spatial-temporal reasoning. The connections drawn between artistic practice and engineering quality represent our analysis informed by this research, not an established causal finding. Individual and business outcomes will vary.