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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?
... 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.
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.
Thank you for calling AOL Tech Support. How may I help you? ... The CD goes into the retractable cup holder ...
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.
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.
... 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 majored in physics, but at a very liberal-arts-focused school.
They taught you a quantum of English necessary for relativistic writing?
Ezekiel 23:20
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.
True on the response not on the original post. Look around any company that has gotten past the raw start-up phase and the balance shifts and shifts until there may or may not be even a majority engineers. Face it most companies are run and managed by non-engineers. Your entire H.R. department? Not engineers. Sales? Only if you're lucky (our last company had "Sales Engineers" to support the sales people and even most of them weren't *really engineers). Marketing, Shipping/Receiving, Maintenance, Finance... the list goes on.
Yes all of these people are paid less than us engineers but there are more of them and it's easier to get their job SO for someone looking to graduate and get hired for decent (maybe not great but certainly livable) pay then the math seems to lean toward the Liberal Arts degree unless you're going to be good at the STEM degree. You half-ass a STEM degree and you'll sit on the unemployment line looking for *that job. You half-ass an L&S degree and someone will pay you to push paperwork around because you're actually *applying for that job and there are more of them out there.
Just sayin...
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.
Hi there. I'm the Chief Technologist of a thinktank and do a lot of technical work, from application & systems design and development through to legislation, policy and regulation. I did a double major in Theatre and English Lit. when I went to university. It amazes me that the majority of 'engineers' or science geeks show such disdain for liberal arts majors. Do they not realise that smart people are everywhere?
The thing that really makes me chuckle, though, is that they don't seem to believe that someone with strengths in the arts could ever be an autodidact, in spite of the fact that most good geeks have this capability as a defining trait. In theatre, I had to learn basic electronics, electrical circuitry, technical design, how to build weight-bearing structures, basic colour theory, linguistics, aesthetics (which, scoff as you like, requires pretty heavy thinking about the nature of human consciousness) and about a dozen other disciplines. And English taught me a little humility about the power of expression. It taught me to harness it as well.
As my colleagues will tell you, I have a significant lack of mathematical ability; my brain is simply not wired to read equations (or musical notation - another great failing). I can do it, but I expend a great deal more effort than my math whiz friends. This puts some programming work outside my competence - algorithms especially. I understand perfectly the concept of big O, though, and with assistance, I can write highly performant code.
But... I can design, create palettes, do layout and describe workflows a fuck of a lot better than most engineers. I know enough typography to be dangerous, and I can outperform most people when it comes to interfaces.
I know the value of a good engineer. I learned it at my father's knee. But if anyone ever suggested that I fill my software shop with nothing but STEM grads, I would laugh them out of the room. No offence, all you engineers, but there's a whole raft of software design and development issues that you guys suck at.
Crumb's Corollary: Never bring a knife to a bun fight.