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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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!
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.
..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.
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.
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.
LOL, you know, I won't dispute the point. Because I agree with it. It's been true for a very long time, and is widespread.
What I suggest is that being an asshole isn't due to a lack of critical thinking skills, it's a personality defect which can subsequently be overcome. ;-)
In some disciplines (*cough* Poli Sci *cough*) where there is no objective right or wrong, the ability to state a case for anything as being equally valid to anything else ... well, some of us don't see that as critical thinking, we see it as rhetoric and sophistry. Because you're not measuring against an objective standard.
The problem comes when you do come from a discipline where things are right or not right, you end up with an overly simplified world view, and nuance becomes something you don't necessarily get.
When there's no room for wishful thinking and sophistry, and you need to use empirical evidence to determine what is happening and what to do about it ... your "feeling" that your "belief" that the router must be sending moon packets is meaningless if you claim it has as much weight as me telling you that the cable is unplugged. Mine is testable and can be acted on, yours is the mistaken belief that if we solve the existential crisis of the router things will sort itself out.
But it becomes a clash of cultures when someone's sensing/feeling/intuition has nothing to do with objective reality, and objective reality is the only thing which matters.
And, likewise, people who only deal in objective reality and can't see past it are largely incapable of doing anything else, unless they've tried really hard to pick up an additional set of skills.
Which means we mostly want to punch people who say the universe could be just a simulation or that a tree doesn't make any noise if anybody is around to hear it, because if it can't be proven true or false, it's probably just a pointless mental exercise. ;-)
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
More like mocking those that supposedly follow his teachings and yet froth at the mouth when it comes to bombing foreigners.
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
... 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,
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.
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.
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!"
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.
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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
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.
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
Someone had to do it.