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Ask Slashdot: Any Place For Liberal Arts Degrees In Tech?
Nerval's Lobster (2598977) writes A new article in Fast Company suggests tech CEOs want employees with liberal arts degrees, because those graduates have critical thinking skills. Meanwhile, a new article on Dice (yes, yes, we know) posits that STEM degrees such as data science, IT admin, and electrical engineering are what science-and-tech companies are going to want for the foreseeable future. What do you think? What place do those with liberal arts degrees have in companies such as, say, Tesla or a biomedical engineering firm?
Not many.
Maybe, if the culture turns towards having secretaries again.
There's certainly a place for people with dual degrees in tech and liberal arts -- people who truly understand the tech they're discussing, plus have the experience in communication and argumentation to explain it, push for it, and lead it.
... tech CEOs want employees with liberal arts degrees, because those graduates have critical thinking skills.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
I have two people interviewing for a programming job right out of college.
1. Has a degree in CS.
2. Has a degree in English Lit.
Hummm.......
Yea right.
Or turn it around.
You are looking for a fiction book editor.
1. Has a degree in CS.
2. Has a degree in English Lit.
Yes still works.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
What matters is who you know and how they perceived you and what they remember of you. If you made one bad joke 10 years ago it can come back against you even if you're the best candidate.
There are arts graduates in our technical writing department. It is about the same effort teaching an engineer to write as teaching a writer about engineering. In general SW or high-level HW design have been the best fit and low level integration the hardest.
What does a Liberal Arts Degree mean these days? There used to be a traditional Liberal Arts education that included theology, grammar, reasoning, rhetoric, philosophy, arithmetic,logic, geometry, music, astronomy, etc. I could see how taking these as formal courses would help someones critical thinking. But how many people with LA degrees have mastered these?
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
Assuming the liberal arts major has something on the ball, tech writer. If it's just an average liberal arts major then simply no.
At least they had a good time in college.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Basically, if you have the knowledge - and can demonstrate it, then your degree will not matter all that much.
Unless of course, you are trying for an extremely competitive position, being choosen by non-tech people.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
In engineering critical thinking is called common sense. The article is as usual bullshit.
What place do those with liberal arts degrees have in companies such as, say, Tesla or a biomedical engineering firm?
There is some fields where linguistics is not only useful but absolutely necessary. Apart from that liberal arts place in tech companies are as customers.
Different mindsets. Liberal arts is all about the why, STEM is the how.
There are kitchens to be staffed, trash cans to be emptied and phones to be answered. All of those things require highly talented individuals who are going to be paying off student debt for eternity making low wages.
Joking aside, the degree matters a lot less or not at all when I hire people. What I am looking for is the ability to think which is unrelated to school and in many cases, counter to it.
"No good deed goes unpunished"
Article sounds like it was written by Liberal Arts major.
I don't want to do a sig now
The best programmers I know are artists and musicians. Most have liberal arts degrees.
I have a Psychology major and Anthropology minor, thought I was going to be a mad brain scientist, then realized that this dream wouldn't pan out.
I hacked UNIX for fun (not profit) in the mid 1990s and realized I knew more about systems than CompSci/CompEng students. I worked in ISPs part time, then became a sysadmins after University.
Fast forward 14 years -- I'm an InfoSec manager in the financial industry -- the STEM skills are useful to a certain degree. The "liberal arts" stuff teaches you to think and write, something that is missing mostly from most pure STEM folks I meet. What is also helpful though is a background or additional education in the business world, which STEM and Liberal Arts typically do not cover.
So just like a varied diet, diversity helps, having a varied educational, learning, and thinking background helps.
My 2 cents.
Or any other skill-less job, secretary, janitor and possibly some other odd small jobs that you can be trained for since your education would lack the training. I'm sure any large tech company is nearly always hiring in those positions.
I'm not convinced this isn't just a massive troll. There's no way this question is seriously being asked.
Ask a group of automotive designers or engineers what a car should look like and you will get essentially the same idea. The tech industry thinks that applying Python versus Java means they are thinking "outside" the norm, but not really. However, I don't think that only liberal arts majors bring "critical" think skills, I do think that they have more in the area of soft skills and understanding the customer. The days of programmer seclusion are ending or as one of my instructors told me: "As a programmer you have to talk to doctors, lawyers, scientists, and artists and be able to understand them and their needs so that you can adapt the software accordingly."
Having a STEM degree and no communication skills is limiting. Having communication skills and no tech background is limiting in another dimension.
This is why my daughter, bless her crazy little cotton socks, has been doing a double major of Liberal Arts and Civil Engineering. She completed the arts degree this spring and will finish her B.Eng. next fall.
XML is a known as a key material required to create SMD: Software of Mass Destruction
I have a degree in English, creative writing BA. Lucky for me, I have a genuine passion for tech and always want to know and understand more and more and more. I have taught myself everything I know, I have hands on experience with enterprise grade firewalls, Windows Server environments, and even dabbled in SQL Administration. I have no certifications.
First: a little bit of spin: make sure that people know you're not the introverted IT guy who is going to stare at his shoelaces. You're at least going to stare at THEIR shoelaces! I emphasize my English degree by explaining how it allows me to communicate with "end-users" no matter what level of technical skill THEY have.
Communication is the biggest part of our job. Next: keep that interest in technology prevalent on your resume. Throughout college, I had a work study position at a local library, helping them with their IT needs. After that, I kept in touch with a friend who got me a foot in the door at one of my first jobs out of college, and I used that to learn more and more and more, take on more responsibilities, learn from higher tier technicians if you're at a job that affords you the opportunity.
I have been able to do pretty well for myself by PROVING that I know the things that I say I know, and by showing constant progress and improvement in my work history on my resume. These things are extremely important. But you can do it.
The typical grad from STEM and some random degree elsewhere likely sits between average and maybe 1 standard deviation about the mean in intellect and potential.
You're not that bright consequently the question as posed, becomes one of in-group versus out-group with a lot of hand waving, pretending to be superior. Sorta like religion.
What was that about having critical thinking skills or the ability to reason with data.
someone needs to write the manual, just saying! don't need to waste my time doing it.
Scott
Before someone gets their panties in a bunch, I am not suggesting that STEM grads have a lack of critical thinking.
The problem, and it's quite evident by the responses so far, is that many STEM grads think alike. Larger companies do not want liberal arts majors to become their lead programmers, they want them to be part of a team that accomplishes a goal together.
Cross functional, diverse work teams are very beneficial to most companies. I've been working with our IT group for the past year to get updates made to the system my group makes. The only guy in that group that had any decent communication skills (he was also a very good programmer) bailed 2 months ago. Now progress is at a standstill because they do not have the confidence to talk to the customer (which is me in this case).
"Action without philosophy is a lethal weapon; philosophy without action is worthless."
I think this is a case of people who don't understand or don't know what software engineering or any engineering discipline actually is making assumptions based on their limited understanding. Any engineering requires tradeoffs among a variety of solutions in order to best meet business requirements, quality requirements, performance requirements, etc.
Her stereotype isn't much above the typical VP level "All you do all day is just type codes." view of software engineering.
Ummm... they do that especially when they're looking for programmers or software engineers. If the liberal arts graduates don't have any experience "coding" and "programming", how are they qualified for "tech jobs"? I think she's confusing "tech jobs" with "jobs at a technology company".
If they were any good at critical thinking they would have thought to get a better degree.
People with liberal arts degrees should work at burger king where they belong!
Critical thinking skills aren't that hard to pick up on the side while you're earning a STEM degree ...
You must be new here.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
I think that Human Computer Interaction is a good place.
I have 3 BAs in the Liberal Arts (Classics (Latin), Art History and French) and an MFA and I can program with the best of them.
Would you want to watch a video of geek trying to play a harp he designed? Would you want to see the result of a liberal arts major trying to design a harp?
Unless they are the same guy. Both answers are no.
I have a degree in Criminal Justice and started a career in technology but it was hard start back in 2003. I do okay for myself now but I would probably command more money had I had a STEM degree.
As someone who has a CS degree from a (respected!) liberal arts college, I can say that, career-wise, it was a mistake. One of the first things that came up in any interview I had during those first few years out of college was "Why did you get a BA instead of a BS?" which launched me into a whole discussion of the fact that I went to a liberal arts college where they only issue BAs....anyway, it was not a conversation that screamed "hire me!"
People love to ask for candidates with "critical thinking skills" but I think that's just code for "people who think like I do and agree with me."
While I'd tend toward Computer Science (since that is what my degree is in) I'd FIRST want to see what they've done already.
Is there anything the Lit major can show that demonstrates his programming skills? Like patches submitted to a FLOSS project? Or a mobile app? Or even a personal website?
It's not that you cannot get a programming job with a Lit degree. It is that the other candidates will probably have more DEMONSTRATED skills in the programming field.
Show me that you CAN program (sufficient to the basic requirements of the project) AND that your Lit degree gives you a different perspective AND how you implement that perspective.
I've had this position in other comments, but I'll say it again - College degrees don't teach you how to do a job, and don't necessarily equate to job performance. To that end, it really doesn't matter what kind of degree someone has. A college degree is about broadening horizons, teaching critical thinking, and exploring subjects in slightly more depth in a controlled environment. I had taken plenty what we now call "STEM" courses in the process of pursuing a Harvard undergraduate degree (of which they don't offer a "science" degree in the classical sense anyway!) A greenhorn college grad will have been exposed to many valuable situations, and a college degree says that they can think and have proven that to some number of accredited boards to their satisfaction. They will still need job training, additional learning, and just plan ole' experience. Some people will be just better at certain types of jobs, and not at others. Do people who choose a particular degree type self-select? Maybe, but there are plenty of medieval lit majors out there programming, and they do it just as well as an EE or CS major.
Oh, and grad school is about torture and the ego's of the adviser committee. It means you spent a lot of time as a serf eating ramen noodles. It may mean you know a lot about almost nothing...
}#q NO CARRIER
There are any number of non-technical jobs for non-technical people. Market research, sales, maybe project management, etc. But in general you hire accountants to do accounting, lawyers for legal services, and techs for technical work.
Bottom line though, is that people who write columns for places like Fast Company and Dice have to write something, so they make stuff up.
..In the gaming industry they are trying to make it relevant. As time goes on we see more and more pretentious drivel "games" that aren't even really games.
Liberal arts majors create the content and tech people curate the frames and galleries. Look at Instragram. Great, you made a photo-sharing app -- but who's using it and to what ends? Applications in marketing, politics, art, photography, modeling, drama, theater, etc.
Look at Facebook -- does anyone share code on Facebook? Facebook's content is driven by liberal arts interests -- human stories about human beings.
When the tech pissing contest ends and everyone is running their servers off automated services, who will be employed? The content creators, not the people who created the frames and galleries. Look at Apple, Google Glass, and iWatch -- do these products call for more tech, more science, more coding? Nope, no one cares about that -- it's already built in. People want art, creativity, style, and usability - insights from the liberal arts.
For example: the liberal arts train students to thrive in subjectivity and ambiguity, a necessary skill in the tech world where few things are black and white I don't see that as being particularly helpful when trying to compile code - it either does or it doesn't. There is no alternative to having an executable pop out of the slot when you "win". It also avoids any notion that technical problems require technical solutions - and the only way to arrive at the best (if not "the") solution is to have a deep understanding of the technical issues and the technical advantages and flaws with each alternative. No matter how good you are at history or philosophy, you won't be helping in this arena.
So while it is quite possible for technically unqualified individuals to work at technology companies, that does not mean they will be working with (or creating) the technology the firm is based on. But it could mean that one day, they'll be your boss.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
tech CEOs want employees with liberal arts degrees
They must've interviewed CEOs of companies with their own employee cafeterias...
"Do you want fries with that?"
It's more opportunity control. Eventually it will take multiple doctorates and ample postdoctoral activities just to flip burgers.
Expatriation control and basic income is a necessity today.
Some of the best programmers I know have degrees in art and music, with even a few English Lit and Philosophy degrees scattered around. Then again, some of the best programmers I know never went or graduated from college. That's just on the IT/Programming side of things.
Hiring a real writer to handle press releases, web "verbiage" (um, the actual text on the website) would do wonders for quite a few sites (like.. /. hiring a real editor would be a boon...), documentation, etc. Once your company gets to a certain stage, you're going to want an HR person, who probably has a LA degree of some sort.
Frankly, outside of an accountant and a lawyer, anyone with a degree that's not from the Business School would be good.
If you were me, you'd be good lookin'. - six string samurai
I guess it depends on what job you're going to be doing. If you job is interface design, then maybe an LA degree might be useful. When I look at a LA degree it says to me the person didn't know what they wanted to do, couldn't figure it out while they were in college, and paid enough money to academia to get some kind of degree to justify the expense. I've met entirely too many people with LA degrees that weren't qualified to do anything useful. To be fair, I'm in a more analytical/scientific field.
In my world, creative thinking, and problem solving are paramount, but in the end you needs results, not just pretty graphs.
Given Beneford's Law of Headlines saying the answer is 'no', you probably shouldn't have asked that.
Sorry.
Basically English Lit. (or whatever) won't help you unless maybe you want to be a tech writer or something. If you want to be a coder, go prove it by making some personal projects. A smart person can find the resources they need online to make just about anything these days, but being able to find answers on your own is where it's at. If you need someone else to look everything up for you, you won't get very far.
The best programmers and other IT professionals that I've ever worked with had liberal arts backgrounds. In fact, a programmer named Paul Laughton who wrote the original Apple II DOS and the current RFO Basic app for Android has publicly stated that in his decades of experience, the best programmers he's worked with have almost always been musicians. Music notation is definitely a code, and the structure of music performance is very much like code writing--quite logical with leaps of creativity when necessary. In general, the ability of liberal arts grads to research, find creative solutions to problems, and communicate them to others is an exceptionally valuable skill in any profession. With modern applications being so graphically intensive, any artistic and graphic design skills are a value added complement to coding skills. The skill learned from studying the liberal arts allow IT professionals give a significant leg up on their peers who do not have that kind of experience. Of course, the liberal arts skill set is only a compliment, not a replacement, to traditional coding and other STEM skills. IT professionals who have both skills enjoy a significant competitive advantage. The study of liberal arts should be strongly encouraged for all STEM students as a stepping stone to future success.
I majored in music and I've been working as a software developer for four years since I graduated. Of course, I did have a previous background in programming. I think good work experience and rapport during interviews goes a long way. However, I do sometimes get the impression that certain doors are closed to me since I don't have the degree.
This is a false dichotomy. In many colleges, the mathematics degree is from the liberal arts college. Computer Science, sometimes considered a branch of mathematics, also comes from liberal arts. There is a difference between a Computer Science degree and a Computer Engineering degree, but there is also some overlap in those capabilities. So not everyone needs to choose.
I work as an Oracle DBA. However, I got into the business in 2000 when the tech bubble was not quite wound down. I was not technical at the time and it took alot of time before I wasn't completely useless. By wanting non-tech degrees, what jobs are they hiring for? I don't know of any companies hiring programmers without a computer science degree? Most Oracle DBAs don't start as a DBA out of school. They start as a developer and move over or maybe a systems admin. So the progression to this profession is a little different.
IF they want people in 'tech' without tech degrees what are they hiring them to do? The number of people who are self taught technical people who are at the point where they can do work without a tech degree is very low. So low that most of them probably get screened out without an interview. There is a big difference between having a Liberal Arts degree AND having 14 years experience. I don't think the entry level IT market is very open to non-tech degree people. From what I am reading , it is not even open to kids with tech degrees. Many are not getting technical jobs.
Alot of people who talk about 'tech' don't know the difference between a TECHNICAL employee or 'some marketing/sales person/tech writer' who works at a tech company. Those are totally different career paths. It is very irresponsible to give advice to young people and say 'get a do you want fries with that' degree and tell them people will want to hire them because they read lots of books and wrote papers. For some reason this gives them 'critical thinking skills'.
My political science degree didn't do a damn thing to help me to be technical. A vast amount of REALLY HARD work did. If I Had a CS degree, I think my learning curve would have been lower mainly because I suffered the early pain in school. Since I have been in the profession I have gotten 2 masters degrees (software engineering and an MBA). Not sure how much they help though.
...double major in something useful and something useless.
I majored in math and computer science. I have a friend who went back to school in her 30s. Her majors are German and Philosophy. She's already getting translation work a year before graduation.
Finding God in a Dog
My undergrad work was in English and psychology, my grad work in philosophy, and it's done me fine. There's never been an instance where I wished I'd had a computer "science" class. Nor have my most capable colleagues been from computer science, on the whole. The comp sci grads tend to have very narrow views of how to do things, which doesn't work out so well in the real world. You have to like to learn to be good here. The liberal arts are far more capable of cultivating that attitude. Comp sci folks, in my experience, only want to learn enough to get a job. Once they show up on the job they're remarkably uncurious. So they can't keep up with changes in tech and programming methods and style. Also, they tend to be uninventive.
Anyone working with tech should have a class in basic logic, as well as a good command of written English, and know how to closely read a book. Beyond that, it's all just getting experience, preferably in the real world, not from exercises based on idealized and unworldly environments. Those who deeply understand computers do not, as a rule, become professors of it. The rewards are so much better elsewhere.
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
1) UI design and usability - programmers are truly horrible at this.
2) Internationalization - It's hard to find people in the US with foreign language skills. Canadian doesn't count.
3) Project coordination with overseas clients or teams - see above and add in foreign cultures.
4) Requirements gathering and/or review - Which requires talking to people and, gasp, reading documents.
5) Business analysis - overlaps Requirements gathering and review
6) UI testing - much of which CANNOT be automated.
7) Project management - which requires communications and people-people skills. Most BAs/MBAs I have met are also truly terrible at this.
Example, a friend of mine has an MA in English. He is currently working for a tech company as QA lead which requires test planning, staff training, requirements review, user documentation development, and business analysis. All of which his degree is helping with.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
I design and implement automated testing systems, including specialized APIs and the VMWare-based virtualization environments designed to support them.
As part of getting a BA in psychology back in the day, you had to have several statistics courses, industrial psychology, human factors, ergonomics and it was strongly suggested that you become familiar with symbolic logic. Neurophysiology, particularly neuronal functioning, was popular too. Had psychology research funding not dried up after Reagan was elected, I might still be in a lab somewhere.
Fate had other plans. Unable to find honest work, I took up the software trade instead. That was 34 years ago.
I use my psychology degree every day.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
Yeah, no kidding ... I'm pretty sure you can't get a STEM degree without critical thinking skills.
However, some of the Poli Sci majors I've met .....
Oy!
And reading the other comments here, the perceived superiority of technical people never ceases to amuse me.
The dogmatism that I have seen and heard on the job and here on Slashdot makes all of you come across as delusional and self aggrandizing.
For technical jobs a tech degree with a non-tech minor is generally better than a pure tech degree, but a tech degree is generally better than a non-tech degree.
For non-technical jobs a non-tech major with a technical minor usually beats a pure-non-tech degree. As to whether that's better than a tech degree with a non-technical minor, well, there's too many variables to make a general statement one way or the other.
A good hiring manager would consider "equivalent life experience" paid or not (yes, serious/huge-time-commitment hobbies count) as good enough to substitute for the lack of any particular class or program of study.
Personally, I wish I had had the time and money to take a couple of business classes, a couple more humanities classes, and maybe a fine art class but my degree program was 9 semesters of almost-all-tech with just the university-minimum-requirements for non-tech stuff as it was and I didn't want to extend graduation nor did I want to increase my tuition bill.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Let's get real, because there aren't enough tech-industry jobs for people with real degrees, let alone fluff degrees in liberal arts, psychology, literature, and so on. Right now there's a surplus of supply and a lack of demand pushing wages down. So your job prospects are grim just to begin with, let alone with no qualifications. Work is drying up for people with real degrees and experience, and wages are going down as companies outsource and fire people. The outsourcers bid less than your salary to do the same job, after all, so they skim theirs off the top and hire someone for what's left - and economy of scale means they're hiring fewer people than companies are firing from full-time jobs. This situation isn't going to correct itself any time soon, until there's a mass exodus from the technology industry and less than replacement level graduates with real degrees. Until the outsourcing wave ends, and the people who get fired move on to other careers, the supply will exceed demand for skilled workers.
...no
Yeah - Desktop Support. AKA "Computer Janitor" because no matter what, you'll always need someone on-site to turn it off and turn it back on. And in the Obama economy, that means 1 person for multiple sites.
Ha, ha, I jest, I jest... tech companies don't have mail rooms anymore, so the answer is no.
Unless you finagle your way into management.
Wait, now that I think about it, we might be thinking along legacy lines. Perhaps the future is more like: managers with liberal arts degrees presiding over completely outsourced technical resources.
Maybe I should go back to school and major in art history.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Can you learn to code without a tech degree? Sure! Can you learn to write wonderful essays without a liberal arts degree? Sure! Will a tech degree help you get into tech? Absolutely!
There are plenty of good coders who have gotten degrees in things like economics or even design. You can certainly teach yourself to be a great coder and put up a Github account that will impress potential employers. Granted, this is a struggle if you didn't study CS or an aligned field in school, but it's doable. Furthermore, companies like Apple have plenty of need for non-technical workers.
On the other side, you don't really need a degree in liberal arts. This can also be self taught. You can read voraciously and teach yourself written expression by practicing on the Internet.
Of course, now we come to the cliche. What did Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg get their degrees in? Nothing.
Democracy Now! - your daily, uncensored, corporate-free
You're overthinking this. Go low brain stem - think tribal. Whomever they interviewed (the CEO), is probably lonely. He (yes, I meant 'he' - you can start another flame war about that) is surrounded by STEM types and feels insecure/inferior cuz he ain't sh*t without 'em. This pisses him off, no doubt. Having someone around that speaks your language and is culturally similar is comforting and gives him a domain where he can display his plumage. After all, isn't an MBA a certificate for plumage display?
I have a psych degree and have worked in software development for 7+ years. I have a good friend who has a Lit. degree and has been in software even longer. It's really about a few things -
a.) your experience. We both did contract and freelance work early on and built up solid portfolios. Likewise, after a few years in the field, my resume trumps my education more often than not
b.) where you apply. I have a few specific criteria in the places I apply (I've been very fortunate to not be in a position of need, and can be choosey about where I apply). Most often, the kinds of places I apply to are the kinds of places that are willing to talk to me regardless of what my piece of paper says.
c.) how you spin it. They look at me a little funny at first, but then I explain just how important an understanding of human behavior is when it comes to humans interacting with machines. Businesses (in general) are starting to open their eyes to the value of good UI/UX and most of the time, they get very interested in me when they think I can solve those issues. Got an art degree? Explain how you can bridge the typical gap between design and development. Got a Lit degree? Good copy and documentation is very important and as a developer, no one knows the system better than you. Got a philosophy degree? Tell them how it taught you to think differently, see things from different angles, and develop better solutions. It's all in the spin.
Content writing, Knowledge Management, Software Localization, Software development phase one (design), BRD Management, Whitepaper creation, Game advisors (for historically accurate renditions of stuff, for example), etc.
Who do you think is writing all the lore in games?
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
We need janitors, security guards, cafeteria workers, secretaries, mail room personnel, typists, clerks, ... The critical thinking that the LA degrees bring ensures they understand that they need their jobs to pay off their student loans, so they're really more like indentured servants than employees.
Interesting line if you are intentionally building a straw man to make the point of the ridiculous divergence between what Jesus taught and US foreign actions (in a land where many claim to follow Jesus).
Jesus taught that the neighbour you are to love includes the person from the distant country who you were brought up to despise. Not exactly reflected in US policy, is it (especially now that the empire is crumbling)?
The problem with STEM, (not so much math, but definitely the other 3), is that they attempt to teach a skill set that anyone with enough curiosity and drive can pick up themselves. The corollary being, if you needed to go to school to pick up the knowledge, you may be the kind of person with no particular feel for the work, who thinks a degree is going to make up for that lack. If you come across someone with a philosophy degree and apparent engineering chops, you're likely looking at an autodidact with passion for the field, who also happens to have a variety of skills that STEM graduates tend to lack, like effective written communication. I've had enough experience with STEM graduates who choke on the first real-world problem they need solve that I tend to avoid them when hiring. I'm looking for candidates with genuine talent, and that doesn't come with a degree. If anything, a liberal arts degree indicates a desire to broaden oneself and learn new things, which is really the ur-skill from which all other skills progress.
>> CEOs want employees with liberal arts degrees, because those graduates have critical thinking skills.
Liberal arts = critical thinking? lol thats funny....And people with CS, maths or hard science degrees are not naturally inclined to think as logically right?
What they ACTUALLY mean is they want more fuzzy-thinking compliant Yes-men, not engineers that actually know their shit and easily spot it when some middle-manager says something that makes no logical sense.
I graduated in 2003 and I have both a BA (philosophy) and a BS (CS;)).
My experience is that spending a generous portion of my time writing made me both a better writer of prose -- and of code. To be counterfactual, is it really possible to express an idea in code that one cannot express in one's native language? Don't just think of yourself -- think of the many coders who come after you. I've noticed a trend toward offering "workshops" (which is, of course, a place where one does no work) or short classes on topics like "dynamic communication" or "how to write good documentation". The idea itself seems Quixotic -- could you teach an English major to be a competent C coder in a few mere hours of instruction? Why do we expect the reverse?
Despite having been coding before I "done gone to college", I think there's a special clarity one gets by being able to express the same idea in different ways and choosing the simplest -- whether that language is Lisp or English.
-- Political fascism requires a Fuhrer.
Business has always had various levels. When it comes to most successful technology companies, be it Tesla, or a small web developer, there's the strategy and there's the execution.
In a technology company, there's no doubt that the execution needs to be done by a technically superior person, but there's a problem with academic structure: it fosters process and procedure. Curtainly a STEM degree imparts critical thinking in terms of experimentation and analysis and calculation. Once a direction exists, yeah those skills are going to run the execution to create the product, service, or effect desired.
But business doesn't start with execution.
Scientific method may be the basis of STEM, and it starts with a "falsifiable hypothesis". Business is very different. Innovative business starts with a "false thesis" -- this doesn't exist, it isn't making any money now, I say it will, let's do it.
It takes a liberally-minded strategist to come up with whatever "it" is. The artist dreams it up. The philosopher contemplates how it ought to exist. The grammarian discerns its structure. The thespian convinces others to invest in it.
The problem is that the scientist concludes that it's impossible before it's even been tried. Either there's simply no evidence in existence yet, or there's no way to experiment on the nothing in-advance of starting.
Inventors aren't STEM scientists. There's no scientific method for innovation, and you aren't likely to find a scientist who's willing to risk everything on a new business idea -- yes I can also list dozens of very famous scientists who did throughout history; contrast that to the number of musicians who spend every dollar they have to start a band.
I know of a few successful persons in IT that have a BA in computer science. There exists colleges out there that do not offer BS degrees, however they do offer a BA in Computer science. The primary difference is that the students are required to learn a second language rather than dissect a frog. As far as computer programming goes, I pose this question: Which might help a person more 1. understanding the nuances of how languages differ and learning key methods to memorize and differentiate those languages, or 2. learning where electrons might be in relation to the nucleus at given energy levels? The math requirements are equivalent for a BA and BS. The approach to problem solving might be a bit different, however any team benefits from multiple different perspectives.
Note I have a BS in CS.
There is or can be built a machine that can simulate any physical object. -Church-Turing principle
Baristas
We need our caffeine.
And enjoyed laughing at us geeks.... but hey there a couple of jobs that just opened up for reporters in Iraq....
From my observation, you always want both. You want STEM folks because they think like STEM folks, and you want non-STEM folks because they don't. How many programmers remain programmers? How many become managers? Account herders? Sales drones? GUI experts? Customer support? STEM folks are no more qualified for many of those jobs than liberal arts people. The difference is that liberal arts people are more willing to learn and master whatever job they are at, while STEM folks want to do what they trained for.
The question is interesting in relation to the current bias against four year degrees for software developers in some circles. If, as Peter Thiel claims, you don't need a degree, then it shouldn't matter what your degree is if you get one. So, from that perspective, a tech degree or a liberal arts degree shouldn't make a difference. If a liberal arts degree makes for a more intellectually well rounded person, then it could be argued that that's the better degree for tech.
Of course, I don't buy Peter's argument at all. A good CS degree teaches foundational methods that can be applied throughout a career. Don't get me started on the number of times basic complexity theory or knowledge of the full memory hierarchy has helped improve performance of web pages. Most hobbyists don't have those skills and write them off as just academic oddities. A good CS degree also exposes you to a range of technologies and methods for developing software (no, CS is not just math, no more than physics is just theoretical physics). It gives you an environment where you can develop your skills and gain exposure to the breadth of topics in the field. It's a Good Thing(tm).
Should all programmers have CS degrees? Of course not, but those that do are always going to have an edge over most of the other ones (there are always exceptions - I know a few great developers without degrees).
-Chris
... English lit. grads with decent programming skills would probably make for good gamer programmers ...
Why would you ever imagine that? Game programming is one of the most technically demanding and unforgiving types of programming out there. It requires much of the detailed theory of many core computer science topics. The sort of knowledge that comes from computer science and such being your core focus, plus a lot of independent studies; the sort of knowledge that does *not* come from computer programming being a secondary interest.
... internal tools for the art pipeline, installers, etc.
Now if you want to talk about game designers then english lit may be a very good match, but game programming no. Maybe tools programming,
My undergrad was a General Studies degree with a concentration in Computer Science. It was from a Liberal Arts University and for the most part is equivalent to a Lib. Arts degree. I'm glad to have taken that route because my masters degree is in Management. Having a well rounded education allowed me to shift into another direction when CS jobs started moving offshore. If you plan on going on for a Masters in Computer Science, then yes... do the Comp Sci degree. If you plan on entering into business and supporting application frameworks an MIS degree or a minor concentration will serve you just as well. It depends on what you want to do with your career. There are some purists that think you aren't an engineer unless you have a 4 year CS degree (hard science). Thats OK, so be it. I've been in the industry for 25 years, have served on the exam writings of two internationally proctored IT certifications and have worked for some of the biggest names in computing including IBM and Sun Microsystems. And... I'm lucky enough to make a pretty decent salary doing something I love to do. Perhaps my experience is biased or unique. But having a rounded background allowed me to move from something I loved, being a geek, to something I love just as much, making the organization I work for a better place and the people with whom I interact with (other geeks) lives a little bit better and happier. In the end, nothing ever ends up how you planned it. It ends up how it was supposed to be. :) Either way, opportunity will pass you by.. Its up to you to be prepared to seize that opportunity when it passes.
I have a bachelor of Arts degree in Psychology and a BA in Computer Science, both from liberal arts schools. I don't think I would be sufficiently prepared with my Psych degree, but I do feel that liberal arts helps me in my job (I'm an API developer/systems admin for a large corporation).
I like this except nuke is excessive.
The code was v1.0. Additional options will be added in future revisions. v1.0 had to ship on-time and on-budget so it had to be kept simple. Its not like we are the gov't and can just print money ... oh wait ...
If you can get a job in the field you would like, then it doesn't matter. How you go about getting the first job isn't clear (or wasnt clear to me at first) but here is how I did it. I got a job as a very very low paid software tech (under $10/hr in the mid '90s), then met a contractor who told me about contracting. I sent out 20-30 resumes to job shops (used CE Weekly). Got my first job (1800 miles away) as a contract systems engineer. Talked my new boss out there into letting me code. 6 months later was hired as a contract software engineer back at the place I originally started as a software tech. The rest is history. Have almost 20 years experience now. And I have no colleg or university degree. So i'm not so sure it matters what degree you have, as long as you can code and understand technical problems and solve them not just patch them(engineering). A degree probably makes it 100% easier to get that first job, BUT its not the only way.. (hence the type of degree wont/doesnt matter)
#include bier;
I have a B.A. in Cognitive Systems, it's a multi-disciplinary degree, about 60% of my course work was Faculty of Arts, and 40% Faculty of Sciences.
What I experienced while in University was this:
Most liberal arts courses are driven by writing essays where you defend a thesis. The actual validity of your thesis didn't matter so long as you are able to find several points to defend it. What I commonly saw was students starting with a conclusion and working backwards to find evidence which best fit the chosen thesis. Heck I did it myself after a while, it was much easier than looking at an entire body of work in a field and working forwards to a valid thesis. In a science course this would be called cherry picking the data, in liberal arts, it's called another day.
My science course work on the other hand is where critical thinking was encouraged. I was taught how to write logical proofs, I was taught how to represent both everyday situations, and also computational operations in the form of atomic sentences. I was taught the dangers of conflating correlation with causation, I was taught the dangers of Type I and Type II errors. I was taught about common logical fallacies. I was taught how to evaluate information critically, I was taught the importance of internal consistency, I was taught how critically examine evidence.
Perhaps some science students could use a little more course work in writing for the purpose of communicating to a broad audience in an uncomplicated way. But when it comes to critical thinking skills, I'll take a B.Sc. over a B.A. any day of the week.
Tech workers drink a lot of caffeine. Somebody needs to work the counter at Starbucks.
When I was at PayPal, there was a senior manager there (he was a director by the time I left) with a French literature degree. But he got lucky by knowing the right guy at the right time.
Kinda like how not all Harvard drop outs start billion dollar companies.
Yeah, no kidding ... I'm pretty sure you can't get a STEM degree without critical thinking skills.
However, some of the Poli Sci majors I've met .....
Oy!
And reading the other comments here, the perceived superiority of technical people never ceases to amuse me. The dogmatism that I have seen and heard on the job and here on Slashdot makes all of you come across as delusional and self aggrandizing.
Its not perceived academic superiority, its actual. As a freshmen stem major I took some senior level poly sci and history classes for fun, no prerequisites -- just the consent of the instructor. The classes covered interesting topics. Getting A's and B's in stem classes took actual effort, getting A's and B's in advanced liberal arts classes took staying awake in class and reading the assigned materials -- i.e. minimal effort.
... like partying.
In other words some of us took stem and liberal arts classes beyond general ed. We know the different demands of both fields quite well. The advantage of liberal arts is that it leaves one with more free time to pursue other interests
You said it best AC.
These people don't have a fucking clue what it takes to be an engineer.
I have some idea about existential philosophy, and I don't think it requires critical thinking skills.
A tech solution that isn't a "correct solution", is a bad solution. Good thing she doesn't work for GM or a bank.
I graduated with an Bachelor's in Liberal Arts with a concentration in Computer and Information Sciences. I took the same core CompSci courses as the folks in the Engineering school. Programming languages, Logic Design, Probability & Statistics, Symbolic Logic, etc.. But I also had the freedom to take courses in History, English, Psychology, Geography, Geology, Astronomy, etc. Being in the schools Honors program gave me the freedom to choose to broaden my education. As long as I met the core requirements for my CIS concentration, along with a minimum number of Honors-level classes, I was free to choose to study whatever other subjects I wished.
And ond of the sharpest coders I ever met was a Music major...
If you want to guarantee working in the trenches for the rest of your life take this advice. That includes, always having to worry about being laid off when the company has an organizational shift of decides to offshore some its work. If you want to be on-call support until your sixty which entails being woken from bed at all hours of the night and on weekends, then take this advise. If you want to sit in a chair working harder than others and wonder why everyone else is getting the big salary jumps and bonuses then take this advice. If you want to live the rest of your life as the ignorant pawn of some else (sit ubu sit) then take this advice. There are no guarantees that you be successful if you get a degree but there is a high probability that you will never be successful if you don't. Besides who wants to live a life of ignorance anyway.. Right??? The sad part is, many people who say you don't need an education don't have one and they don't know what they have missed. Those who have one and say so may have forgotten they were supposed have learned in school or do not appreciate the gift that have been given to them. There are no guarantees.
Communication and research skills are a requirement for both jobs. Computer science is a requirement for neither job.
Seriously. Does anybody in his right mind think there's no place whatsoever for non-technical folks at tech companies?
This is what they say, but what they really want is H1B and similar workers.
The value of a degree has never been less in this country.
Yes, they want (and NEED) people with critical thinking skills and a firm grasp on the fundamentals of science as per their field, but what they're saying they need with their money is something not even close to that mark in any regard... at least in IT/systems/storage/development.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
A disproportionate number of talented programmers I know studied music.
has a Ph.D. in 17th century English literature. Admittedly we do work at a college, but you might be surprised at what humanists are doing these days: he got into the computer side of things while building databases of who was sending who letters around then. Digital Humanities is a growing field, and one that has some interesting CS applications- you've got things like Mallet chewing through vast swathes of literature looking for correlations, you have folks building high end digital maps to look into questions of how sight lines affected historical battles, etc.
"Seven Deadly Sins? I thought it was a to-do list!"
A lot of tech people that I have worked with (not most but a lot) have poor communication skills. Many of them are very good coders but have difficulty when it comes to documenting or explaining complex topics. Fine Arts grads tend to be very good at communication.
In the business world most executives do not understand technical subjects in a way that tech people do. A good tech person can take a complex technical subject and break it down into terms that business people can understand. That is a very valuable skill.
As an aside, one of the best coders I ever worked with was an English Literature major. Go figure.
A liberal arts degree does not suggest better critical thinking skills than that of an average bloke from the street. Neither does a STEM degree, by the way.
It very much depends on the kind of degree and the kind of seriousness. If I have someone who has a PhD in ancient languages with some serious papers published about Hebrew reception of old Arabic mathematics treatises and he applies for a programming job, he'll have a significant edge in my book over someone doing the same with a B.A. in computer science. Because then I'm pretty sure that the former one knows his shit. And he knows what it means to know about shit, and what to do when you don't.
But somebody with a B.A. or even M.A. in English Literature? That does not tell much more than that he was in college. One needs to dig a lot deeper than that to figure out whether that implies that he even has the critical thinking skills needed for serious work in, well, English Literature. Since "I have a degree" is quite not the same these days from "I am able to advance the state of the art in my chosen profession". You can easily have a B.A. who actually belongs in academy wipe the floor with a PhD by the time he is 3 terms in.
Not just in liberal arts, but liberal arts have somewhat more of a tendency of permitting people to get a degree who are unsuitable for serious scientific work.
To really advance the state of the art in liberal arts, you need decades of education in your field of study. The real gifted people peak at about 60 years, while mathematicians peak somewhat after 30. So it's not all that surprising that degrees in liberal arts are more often toy degrees than in STEM fields. Because by the time degrees are handed out, it's far too early to judge whether you are any good. And by the time you can make a difference, the time for degrees is long over. But at least one can see how fast someone is developing towards being useful in his field.
There is a famous quote from Picasso:
Hitler was a pretty mediocre painter in his Vienna time.
There is some moral in there, but I forgot. I probably should not try getting a job as a writer.
Looking at the job postings at the first few companies mentioned in the FastCompany article I see requirements for Software Engineer and Developer jobs are CS degrees. Hard to dovetail that with what at least what 2 of the CEOs said in the article. I didn't dig far.
I wonder if the job postings at the companies are for show, to prevent getting sued for adverse impact hiring practices, or what?
I think this is one of the strongest assets of liberal arts education: it's the ability to learn skills in one domain and then translate those skills to another domain. Being able to apply skills learned earning a psychology degree into other, non-psychology domains is exactly what a BA degree should be providing. The other side of this coin, is that individuals with BA degrees often seem to have an easier time discussing complex topics not specifically covered by their course work. This means that individuals with BA degrees often will excel in roles that interface two or more groups. By acting as a bridge between groups, the individual can provide a certain value that is not provided by people in either group. Also, it allows more opportunity to move between groups as conditions change, which means that there is more flexibility in which jobs are available. Hence, choosing a job can then become more selective.
There are no guarantees, so school doesn't guarantee you anything. School can be good, it can open up doors, or it could not. Maybe you can open doors without school.
I say if you want to go and study liberal arts, that's fine. If you want to go and study tech, that's fine. But if you don't want to do anything that involves a degree anyway, you shouldn't feel like you must do school.
You can learn in school, or you can learn things yourself. Life experience can be very valuable too. Teaching yourself how to learn without a teacher is also very valuable.
Democracy Now! - your daily, uncensored, corporate-free
I wouldn't bother. Get your degree and get out as fast as possible. You don't really need school to learn liberal arts or tech. School will give you a big leg up, but remember you are mostly there to get the piece of paper. I imagine most people would learn a lot more in one year of self-directed study than they would while getting a four year degree.
So get your degree quickly. You should just pick one major. Try not to change it. If you want to spend more time in school, get a master's degree.
Democracy Now! - your daily, uncensored, corporate-free
in Philosophy.
He'd written everything from operating systems to end-user applications and had a well-thumbed first printing of Knuth's TAOCP: Vol. 1 and was the person I brought my royalty check (for finding an error and a point of improvement in _Digital Typography_) in to work to show.
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
So someone labeled me as a Troll for this statement. I decided to look up the author of the Article Elizabeth Segran. From her web site it says "She received her Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley in the field of South and Southeast Asian Studies with a Designated Emphasis in Women, Gender and Sexuality.". She sure sounds like a Liberal Arts major to me.
I don't want to do a sig now
I am a Business Analyst for a datacenter company. I used to be a web developer.
I have a BA and MA in English.
I was in a class where a proud business student told me that the people in charge make the best decisions, because that's why they're in charge. I haven't forgiven my undergraduate school yet.
I teach in a unique graduate program for students who developed an interest in CS after completing a bachelor's degree in another field, usually in the liberal arts or social sciences. For their thesis, students can combine their old field (if it still interests them) with CS. Our grads have been doing great in the market, although it's probably more because of their graduate CS degree than their undergraduate degree. One built upon her English degree to become a tech writer, but most become software engineers.
There are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation and naming things.
to Phil Karlton. But he does it so often that it is usually attributed to Tim Bray. Naming things is where the code monkeys usually fail. Engineers who think they are programmers usually fail at it hard. It takes a certain fluidity and realization of how actual human beings interact with the world to give content meaningful context (by naming it right) and to understand problem domains well-enough to pick the right cache invalidation schemes. And, of course, understanding how human beings interact with the world is what one gets out of a liberal arts degree. As I said, it doesn't have to be a degree, but the background has to be there.
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
When 2/3 of all the jobs go to H1B temporary workers, I'd say that the degree is secondary to the visa.
Most liberal arts courses are driven by writing essays where you defend a thesis. The actual validity of your thesis didn't matter so long as you are able to find several points to defend it.
Then you had poor teachers, unless you were taking only courses in the art of persuasive writing (or, as you call it, rhetoric). If your other professors let you get away with this, then shame on them.
As someone who has taught university courses (and who has discussed pedagogy and writing with a lot of faculty in both sciences and humanities), I do see the value in constructing a thesis with supporting evidence as a first step to writing an expository essay. But at some level you do need to question the validity of the argument and the significance of the evidence -- if your professors never required this level of rigor, they did you a disservice.
On the other hand, as someone who has read thousands of student essays over the years, let me also say that faculty are often overwhelmed with simply trying to get students to put together some semblance of a logical chain of an argument in the first place, let alone requiring the rigor you're talking about. That's not to excuse what you describe, but a significant percentage of university-level students have such poor writing skills now that they can get nowhere near the standard you suggest. And professors are often just happy to have a kid submit something that "sounds like an argument," even if it isn't fully rigorous, because it's better than much of the crap that has to be read and graded.
What I commonly saw was students starting with a conclusion and working backwards to find evidence which best fit the chosen thesis. [snip] In a science course this would be called cherry picking the data, in liberal arts, it's called another day.
Well, it's also called "confirmation bias," which is problem both in scientific experimental design and in humanities arguments. Part of the problem is that humanities issues are often not quantifiable in the same way that science ones are, and even if you try to quantify them, you end up with so many interacting variables that statistical analysis can be pretty meaningless. So, in some ways it's related to the fundamental nature of the content of the field -- which still doesn't excuse poor reasoning.
My science course work on the other hand is where critical thinking was encouraged.
Okay, let's see what that entailed....
I was taught how to write logical proofs, I was taught how to represent both everyday situations, and also computational operations in the form of atomic sentences.
That sounds like a course in "formal logic," which is often taught in philosophy departments, not science courses. And as for "represent... everyday situations," I have met many, many science undergraduates who have very little perspective on applying their methods to "real-world problems," unfortunately.
I was taught the dangers of conflating correlation with causation, I was taught the dangers of Type I and Type II errors.
This is basic statistics, which should be a required course for everyone, no matter what major. (Frankly, I think it should be required to graduate high school.)
I was taught about common logical fallacies.
This is traditionally the purview of a rhetoric course in English or the logic courses in the philosophy department, though given your background in Cognitive Systems, I assume you might learn about this in the course of various cognitive biases.
I was taught how to evaluate information critically, I was taught the importance of internal consistency, I was taught how critically examine evidence.
Now we're finally getting to "critical thinking," and this should be important in any rigorous college course, regardless of discipline.
The problem is t
Yet they spoke to CEOs from tech companies...which means you did not read it....
I finished art school but i work in PLC programming, im not good enough to earn living as artist, yet.
In commercial art there are rules and best practices that you are expected to learn: light and shadow, anatomy, composition. Like in programming, you are expected to know basics and how to apply them. Being creative comes only after mastering basics. You cannot be making money, create anything worthwhile to other people, if you dont know your tools. Both programming and art force you to think things through. You wont evolve by simply coping drawings, or coping some piece of code without understanding how it works. I only speak for commercial art, and only from the little experience i have, since i dont earn living by it.
Art school theory stuff, that irritates most people here, is different thing entirely. From my experience with it, most of the theory is BS. It has very complicated way of saying very simple things, has its own vocabulary. When you finish art school your best bet at finding work is teaching at the same school. Most professional contacts you get are also from the school. So its kinda feedback loop, radical ideas have very hard time creeping in. Todays radical teacher in art school would be the one, who gives students anatomy lessons. That`s how things are in Europe atleast.
But art school made me better at troubleshooting programs, dunno how the skills translated.
They spoke to some CEOs and favored some of their opinions over others. Did they pick and choose? Yes! Is there bias? Yes! Is there a conflict of interest? Yes!
I don't want to do a sig now
Honestly, for me, I loved Pascal, HyperCard and Maxromedia Director. That interest led me to Objective C, then Java, then back to Objective C AND Java. But programming (and now architecting software and services) may not be your interest. But if so, you can learn many ways without univeristy. Save that for the really interesting stuff.
- Ubique, Tom Termini www.bluedog.net - WebObjects / J2EE SOA / iPhone solutions for knowledge workers
Oh, my, yes there is! We desperately need someone to keep the coffee pot fresh and to make sure we don't run out of paper in the restroom!
What do you do when there's a liberal arts major at your door?
Pay them for the pizza.
In all seriousness, though. I know several people who have gotten into tech with a liberal arts degree. They learned a technical skill and convinced a recruiter that they're right for the job.
I hear you. I agree that ideally a B.A. should teach critical thinking. I also don't think this is the case in most places.
I think this is the natural dilution one can expect with so many people attending school. The rise of a for profit education model has made higher education widely accessible, but at the cost of quality. A lot of these additional students end up studying humanities, because quite frankly the requirements to be admitted are less rigorous (math pre-requisites for instance).
In the world of ideals you are correct, but in the world we live in I still suspect a science student is more likely to have critical thinking skills.
In science course work you are constantly exposed the notion that there are correct and incorrect answers to a given question. Not every answer is seen as carrying some degree of validity. Some solutions work, others do not.
In humanities coursework, many different answers to the same question are often seen to carry value. In some domains that may even be the case. In my Arts coursework I very rarely saw a professor entirely shoot down a bad thesis (with the exception of one excellent religious studies teacher who busted bad citations/interpretations with glee). They might test you on memorization of facts, but beyond that it was hard to give a wrong answer. Process was emphasized, but product didn't matter as much.
If I was an employer and I had two seemingly equal candidates to choose from. I'd be more inclined to hire the one with a sciences background. If only because their coursework was more likely to be results oriented. Having the appearance of rigor is not sufficient to yield the desired outcome.
P.S. Your are right about stats, I also think formal logic should be mandatory for everyone. Ever try to predicate a brief from a supreme court ruling? It's wonderful the logical inconsistency one can uncover when forced to mathematically evaluate reasoning.
P.P.S. I attended the University of British Columbia. I don't know if that helps you evaluate how typical/atypical my impression of humanities teaching might be.
Yep.
As an analogy I'd point to pedigree and breed in a dog show. Your FORMAL education also has a breed (your major/minor) and a pedigree (which schools you attended).
But when it comes to hiring, I'd be looking for the "big dogs". And while breed and pedigree can be a factor (Chihuahua compared to Sheep Dog) I won't exclude the mutts.
If you have the drive and dedication to complete a formal major in one field while spending your free time becoming competitive in a different field then you are someone I should be interviewing.
I was a philosophy major as an undergrad, have a Masters in Theological Studies, and a PhD in New Testament, and pastored a couple of churches along the way (part time.)
I've been working in IT continuously since the mid 90's (part-time when I was working on the PhD), and am presently employed by a Major Telecommunications Company as a senior architect. I make very good money, and when I left another Major Telecom Company in March, after 15 years, I had 15 inquiries just by posting to Facebook. The other day, I had a recruiter from Amazon practically beg me to come interview (they lost out in March due to being too slow to arrange an on-site interview.)
The degree doesn't matter. The skills matter. If anything, my broad background sets me apart from the pack. But only because I've got the skills.
"He who would learn astronomy, and other recondite arts, let him go elsewhere. " -- John Calvin, commenting on Genesis 1
I can tell without angering my boss i work in an EU institute that does applied research and transfer of technology. I have a say in whoever we hire in the teams i supervise; I don't supervise alone. Nearly nobody does here. We have to read a lot of academic research and skim trough a lot of bullshit publications. I am looking at you China... So we need people with excellent critical thinking skills.
In my experience, the people most able to spot bullshit and fallacies were the mathematicians. Where i studied and where i work, a maths master degree is more than 7000 hours of demonstrating things and spotting errors. Nobody beats that. Physics graduates are good too. With engineers it depends of their strengths in maths. And yes, we ask candidates to show us their grades in the maths and core curriculum skills. Theses are those which matter. Usually we care less about the last year purely technical skills. We sometimes hire people with engineering degrees of a specialisation in a field different than ours because we think he or she has good intellectual skills.
That's our policy. Some companies where friends of mine work hire *only* engineers and most poeple there do not even know what the content or a "pure" science degree from a science faculty (physics, maths, chmistry...) looks like. It is unfair to pure sicentists but i have observed that in the industrial world (including the European Space Agency) engineers are more easily hired and -much- better paid.
I have a degree of engineering physics from a engineering faculty. It's some sort of hybrid between a machanical engineer and a physicist. When i did a "sciency " Ph.D. instead of a more "engineering" one my frieds told me it was pofessional suicide. They were wrong. If i had looked for a job in France, they would have been right.
I would -never- hire a lib arts graduate or the closest local equivalent (communication graduates). Anyway, the secretary has a list of degrees which get the automated polite "due to your skills we won't hire you" response. The list included degrees in communication and journalism, psychology, sociology, politcial "science" and -yes- someone included the US liberal arts degrees. The list is long. We have a few employees form the US too.
There are reasons we don't want to hire them -even as janitors-. One is in our opinion they have NOT the crtitical thinking skills we need. They have zero background in maths. Usually not even high school maths. They confuse being able to argue with critcial thinking. A five years old kid is able to argue. They are delusional people who spend all their academic life bullshitting people. Usually it gos back to high school. I have experience in dealing with these sort of people in my student life. Later i had the displeasure to teach statistics to psychology students. Not only were they unabe to do statistics, not only most of them were completely unable to do even junior high school maths but what worse is they were not even smart enough to recognise it and insisted in faking that abilityy !
Not to be able to reason is already a proof of lack of critical thinking. To not be aware you are not fooling anyone and trying to bullshit people anyway is an even worse proof of lack of critical thinking. It shows you are clueless. I have met quite alot of psych students trying to make me believe they studied quantum mechanics because they knew ho to pronunce "kantumakaniks, hurr durr". I sometimes meet people of their kind online. People form various countries. They all look frighteningly similar. Such people are crackpots.
Likewise, being able to "write essays" does not impress us. Lib arts graduates donot really have skills in the sense of what we expect from serious university graduates. They have culture. Superfical culture. It makes them pleasant dinner companions but not hardned professionals. I have some US online friends studying poli sci or lib arts and they are greatly delusional about their level of "skill". The deans of their faculties should be hanged for s
H.P. once had a CEO with a degree in medieval history and a quick blessing of a MBA. Carly Fiorina used her first degree extensively in finding new ways to punish employees. She was also rather good at dividing and conquering a corporate culture. I'm not sure her efforts were appreciated though.
I used to work in telecom encryption. One of the better encryption engineers had a degree in Philosophy. He was just offered a job, and could already navigate linux well. Changed my whole thinking on "You need an engineering or tech degree to do this job". I think he's the team lead now, and he deserves it.
Not to get a job. I lingered long, but managed to still save millions from a job.
I really don't care what degree they have. I'm looking for people that like to dig into the details, find and solve the problem. Someone I can tell to do something and figure it out using Google, or the manuals, or god-forbid ask their co-workers for help and doesn't have to come to me every 15 minutes and say they can't figure it out. Someone that can RTFM and make it work.
My science course work on the other hand is where critical thinking was encouraged. I was taught how to write logical proofs, I was taught how to represent both everyday situations, and also computational operations in the form of atomic sentences. I was taught the dangers of conflating correlation with causation, I was taught the dangers of Type I and Type II errors. I was taught about common logical fallacies. I was taught how to evaluate information critically, I was taught the importance of internal consistency, I was taught how critically examine evidence.
Surprising or not, all of those things were taught to me in the introductory class on formal logic from my local philosophy department. I took that one for fun during the usual technical courseload. Now I am thinking of finding a school with a good BA philosophy program that focuses on logic. If you enjoyed picking up those things piecemeal through a dozen classes, you may want to look into a focused and far deeper approach like I am.
I have a liberal arts degree (Political Science) and I work in tech as a product manager - Writing requirements docs, training, travelling, evangelizing as the voice of the customer. I also have more job security than my coder-peers as my job hasn't been outsourced, unlike many of theirs.
However, I've always dabbled in computers and software, going back to my TRS-80 Model 1 in 1980.
The biggest challenge is that while Tech CEOs talk the talk of wanting 'critical thinking skills' it doesn't translate down to the line managers doing the hiring. All they know is STEM, so that's what they fall back on.
I'm guided by the experience of the airlines. While you must, obviously, have the right sort of pilot's license, they also want a four year university degree. Not because it necessarily enhances your flying, but because it shows you can learn and accomplish things. If you can learn and accomplish things, and know your way around computers, I'd love to talk to you.
The big problem at most places I've worked is getting promising resumes past HR people who only count buzzwords.
...laura
There are already enough non-qualified people taking manager's positions which effectively steal away the career path for technical people.
So, no, get out, go make your own industry.
Liberal Arts degree gives you critical thinking skills? I had to read that three times, what an utter load of nonsense.
In my experience, a Liberal Arts degree teaches one how to deconstruct works of fiction (and incorrectly and overdone mostly) and how to make huge assumptions and logical leaps.
There is plenty of room for Liberal Arts in Tech...
My shoes need shinning and my waste basket is full!
Go find a STEM major to explain selection bias and other related systematic errors in field of statistics. ;-)
Why dontcha give it shot yourself?
The best and brightest of liberal arts are far more likely to apply to law school than the best and brightest of computer science.
Please explain why Physics majors performing far better on the LSAT than Computer Science majors is just selection bias.
Physics is actually a traditional field of study for those wishing to become patent attorneys. Physics majors applying to law school is not as much of an anomaly as computer science majors. Its been a somewhat common thing for a long long time.
Coffee boy?
Boy, if they pay well to people who detect BS they do not have enough money to hire me.
Would I give my heart surgery to a guy that does not have an MD, but has a bachelor in poetry? Absolutely not!
Does a bachelor in poetry have a place in a hospital? Yes absolutely!
In particular, liberal art graduate tends to be good communicators. And that is something pretty much all tech field need. We need lots of people to help the tech field communicate.
I am working in a university in a CS department, and I strongly believe that having people to help us "publicize" our work is very important. I'd love to have a youtube channel full of interviews of different members of the department. Maybe short videos explaining a particular paper I wrote. That would be cool and would fulfil our job to explain what we are doing to the public.
We had a couple of artist in our college last year who essentialyl tried to make a piece of art by taking a marionette and coupling it with a few camera to build an "interactive automaton".
Write the script.
Tell the story.
Sell the hell out of it.
Just a Dirty Hippie Freak...what do I know...
I'm sick of this bullshit belief that "liberal arts" refers to non-STEM majors in the humanities and social sciences, and is college in "easy mode". Quick history lesson: it's called "liberal" arts because from Roman times through the Renaissance, they were the skills that made one worthy of being a free person, as opposed to the manual skills appropriate for a slave. They included both artistic subjects like grammar, rhetoric, and logic, and scientific "arts" like astronomy and math. Of course meaning changed over the years, but today liberal arts colleges try to create well-rounded generalist thinkers, jacks of all trades and masters of at least one.
I've got a BA in physics from one of the top liberal arts colleges in the nation. You might think that's a joke, but my PhD advisor at MIT didn't. I'm now a tenured professor in physics, and my college buddies do stuff like dark matter research at Livermore, software development for Google and Microsoft, etc.
Enough bragging and tech namedropping, the point is that a liberal arts education can get you an excellent technical education. Unfortunately, too many major universities offer a "liberal arts" program which *is* college easymode, intended for folks who go to college for the social scene. But getting a liberal arts at these places is like buying organic local produce from Walmart: sure, they have it, they've got everything, but it's so contrary to the philosophy of the place that you're right to be skeptical.
"Is there any place for degrees in the humanities and social sciences in tech?" Now that's a reasonable question, to which I think the answer is obviously "yes", and my friends the Latin major computer programmer and the religion major tech writer would agree. But if you think "liberal arts" can't provide a top-notch education in STEM subjects, you're not qualified to read a resume.
25 year IT Pro currently doing network security analyst, 15 years as network pro (Cisco/Windows/Linux/etc/etc). Graduated w/ psych degree, put it to work in the bar biz for 10 year. Computers as a hobby turned career after a few years. Point being: Never stop learning, growing and just plain futzing with stuff. My degree helped me learn how to really learn and do it on my own. Read, understand, play, fail, learn more.
The original Liberal Arts (a term which literally means, more idiomatically translated from ars liberalis, "skills [needed] of free men") were, funny enough, mostly things that we would consider branches of mathematics today, and thus STEM fields.
First there was the "trivium" (from whence our word "trivial", because these skills were considered so basic and elementary):
- Grammar
- Logic (now considered a branch of mathematics)
- Rhetoric
But then there was the "quadrivium" which followed that:
- Arithmetic (obviously a branch of mathematics)
- Geometry (obviously a branch of mathematics)
- "Music"
- "Astronomy"
The last two are the most interesting ones, because "music" was not about playing instruments or singing, it was essentially harmonics, the study of "number in time"; and likewise, "astronomy" was not about the actual particulars of celestial bodies, but was essentially dynamics, the study of "number in space and time". These complemented geometry as the study of "number in space" and arithmetic as "number in itself".
In short, the quadrivium, which was over half of the original Liberal Arts, was entirely things we'd now consider mathematics; and a third of the remaining portion in the trivium, logic, would also be considered mathematics today. Five sevenths or over 71% of the Liberal Arts were all math subjects.
These were all intended to prepare one for the study of philosophy, which at that time encompassed what would become the natural sciences of today. (In the middle ages philosophy was in turn considered to be essentially in a support role to theology, but of course you'd get that kind of attitude in the continent-wide theocracy that was old Christendom.)
The Liberal Arts were to teach people how to communicate their thoughts coherently, rigorously, and persuasively, and to be able to think quantitatively about things in themselves and also their relations in space and time, all of that for the purpose of conducting the kind of broad and deep critical thinking about of the world we live necessary to live life as a free individual and to preserve the freedom of one's society.
Dismissing all of that for "science lol stem envy much" is the start of the road to serfdom.
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
Certainly if you are good at modern languages, tech companies are very interested in localization. It's unlikely you'll achieve a rockstar programmer wage, but you will definitely find stable employment if that's what you want.
Well, if you're a journalism major, there is this.
If you have a degree from a top liberal arts school and a working knowledge of the tech, many corps will hire you "to manage the MIT kids" whom they do not trust to get anything done on their own.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Tech jobs want specialists in the product, be it hard or software. We live in the age of specialties, since few people can master all tech knowledge. Management should be equipped for critical thinking, by nature or by hiring the needed skill. If a specialist and his friends start a high-tech venture, surely they will hire lawyers, accountants and other non tech specialists? The markets will require a prospectus, which begets lawyers and financials, which begets accountants, and as the company grows a hired cadre of people will emerge with all the needed skills because market feedback will ask questions that rewuire those specialists to answer them.
You shouldn't need a second bachelor's degree, because only the first four years should be challenging. By the end of college it's supposed to become easier. You learn how to learn. You should be able to learn more material at that level through self-study.
After four years, you should be ready for a Master's degree. In that program, they'll hold your hand a little less and the pace will be faster.
Getting a second bachelor's is like staying in high school to take extra electives. You should be past that level at that point.
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So, how many of you have downloaded an open source package, or even read the description posted by the developer and been unable to figure out what is does? How many of you have installed such a package and found that the documentation doesn't help you to use it, or is so complex that it is difficult to figure out where to begin to use it? I think this is a common problem. Either you are forced to read source code if it is available and quite often the source is inscrutable because the code has been refactored to run efficiently as an OOD implementation but the user logic for the package is lost or obscured because the developer either cannot write or didn't make an effort?
I would love to work for LA people who can write and where my challenge is to show that I understand some package by explaining it to them so that they could write the documentation. There is quite a bit of software out there that requires developer skills to figure out and use. The LA types could help developers communicate what their work does. I try to write as well as I can, I think that being able to write is as important as any coding task I have ever faced.
I am quite interested in Literate Programming and Reproducible Results tools that are beginning to become important, for example emacs org-tool and the iPython notebook. There are liberal arts people who can do more than edit MS Word and some of them actually use emacs, although not many, but tools that mix code and markdown could be an area where writers can really help.
This is quite a separate problem from business administration or business politics. I grant you that shit floats and some of the smoozers rise to positions they don't deserve for not being competent technically when the product is technical and engineered. I have worked for a couple of these types and it is no fun.
I've got degrees in both. Believe me, I don't want a single one of my former classmates from CS as a fiction book editor ... And lately, though I work in IT, because I landed in management eventually, I spend more time using my English background. Rhetoric comes in handy when trying to convince my bosses to fund what we need. I understand the tech, AND can make the arguments needed to get the people and budget I need.