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Do Tech Firms Really Want Liberal Arts Majors?
Nerval's Lobster writes: Not too long ago, a Forbes writer declared that a liberal arts degree had "become tech's hottest ticket." At so-called 'disruptive juggernauts' such as Facebook and Uber, George Anders wrote, 'the war for talent' had moved into non-technical realms such as marketing and sales. While there's undoubtedly some truth to Anders's thesis, technology recruiters and executives aren't seeing any less demand for strong technical skills in a wide variety of roles (Dice link). When there's a need for tech professionals with 'soft skills,' at least one recruiter just recruits computer-science majors from liberal arts schools, figuring those recruits will be more 'well-rounded.' To be clear, Forbes doesn't suggest that IT employers have begun mixing liberal-arts graduates into their technical teams; the article talks more about those graduates ending up in supporting roles such as sales and marketing, or else becoming intermediaries who translate the customer's product requirements into engineering solutions. But nobody should think that a strong technical background isn't as valued as ever throughout tech companies.
Bring on the usual /. hatred of liberal arts majors.
Sorry, but you have never posted a story which doesn't link to Dice.
Which means you're a fucking paid shill who does nothing but post links to crappy fucking Dice articles.
Timothy, you suck for continuously posting this shit.
No.
"Dice Link" says it all.
Ads.
Because the more of these people that enter the tech field the sooner they can start answering the phones for "Helpdesk, how can I help you?" and have 0 chance of them leaving that career path due to their complete and utter lack of technical aptitude. This frees those people who have tech skills to better put to use instead of answering the damn phone from users who still can't figure out how to turn on Wifi on their laptop.
Wheel of Time: Book by Book and Sumview (summary review) Bigdady92 style: http://bigdady92.blogspot.com/
The guys I've worked with over the years that I admired most from a technical standpoint don't even have technical degrees. Having a technical degree means little. Don't be fooled by the title or degree.
I once worked some very complicated IT security jobs. The two guys that solved almost all of our very serious problems for two years had degrees in Biology and Chemistry, nothing to do with computers. I'm not impressed with a person's degree. I'm impressed with merit. Show me you can do the job, show initiative, good judgment, and a willingness to learn. That's impressive. Most of the asshats I've worked around that were really asshats had degrees from places like Carnegie Mellon and Brown, a couple from Stanford. They routinely got their asses handed to them by guys with associate degrees from no-name small town colleges.
No. Fuck you Dice.
I've always had an interest in computers and electronics as a kid, but I mostly avoided computers during my first tour through college. I managed to get an internship through a roommate to test software. After my contract was up six months later, I became a video game tester and lead tester for the next six years. I went back to college to learn computer programming and made the college president's list for maintaining a 4.0 GPA in my major. I've been doing IT support contract work for the last ten years. Now I'm doing computer security. Sometimes the best people to hire are the ones who take their time finding out what they want to do.
But if they run out of h1-bs they'll settle. A college degree is a quick n dirty way to weed out the unstable. At the very least you know the were reliable enough to make it through a four year degree Companies don't give a shit about your back story.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
I have a Masters in history and also a programming degree. So if you have any openings for breaking-the-paradigm-new-perspectives-shaking-things-up managers, I'm your man!
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
There are not many liberal arts students who seriously embrace programming, but those who do, generally enter the field from the angle of AI. In my opinion they belong to the best. Luc Steels comes to mind, or Walter Daelemans.
Paai
or else becoming intermediaries who translate the customer's product requirements into engineering solutions
So they take the specifications from the customers and take them down to the engineers?
I believe these will be the first people to be laid off. Hopefully they have some kind of great idea like a jump-to-conclusions mat.
From TFS:
"or else becoming intermediaries who translate the customer's product requirements into engineering solutions"
or in other words:
"I deal with the god damn customers so the engineers don't have to. I have people skills; I am good at dealing with people. Can't you understand that?"
CAPTCHA: apropos
It can aid in creative roles, for sure.
UI design being a major obvious one.
It can help in design choices on how to go about things, how to display something to the end user, to ensure an end user can interpret a UI properly, that it isn't too confusing or obtuse.
Aiding a persons creativity and history of said creative space can't be all that bad.
Large areas of liberal arts will always be useless depending on the role you are performing in your workplace, but each will likely have a use somewhere at some level.
Languages, forward-facing communication between clients and other businesses, content of presentations.
Art history, more variety in designing UIs, posters, presentations, demos and others rather than "programmer art" tier designs.
Music, uh, hmm, well, I guess if you are working in an audio-based company, it works there. Audio is one I have less experience with.
The biggest negative press Liberal Arts gets is the absolute fucking douche nozzles that can come out of them at times.
But don't let that put them down in their entirety. IT also has a shitload of dicks in general, as does EE, as does physics, chemistry, medicine and about pretty much any role that exists anywhere. Even nurses. Nurses! (admittedly all the times I have been in hospital, I have had nice nurses, and stupidly hot student nurses, pls boner)
If the person has an absolute lack of IT skills, I'd not hire them. Even if they never went near the IT side of things.
Hiring someone with both areas under their belt is always going to be handy though.
But if someone is plainly better at their job and only had, say, IT, yep they got the job.
In the end, it all comes down to their main job role and their skills in said role. Even if another person knew every language that exists, if they were crappier at designing a CPU than another that never, they ain't getting the job. Honestly, it would be a bit of a complement since someone that knew every language in the world would have a bucket load of jobs they could get that would be well paid.
...It stands to reason that the only positions that can presently be legally hired in the US will come with a liberal arts background.
I'm a tech person who generally tries to avoid sales people as much as possible, but I'd never in a million years suggest that sales is a "supporting role". If it were not for the sales staff where I work, I'd have no income, and consequently be living in a van down by the river. The engineering staff knows how to do a lot of great stuff, but getting the foot in the door at a customer and then getting them to buy our product isn't one of them. There are other departments a company might be able to get by without, but sales isn't one of them.
Without a product, you can't sell anything.
Without a sales, you don't have income.
Without income, you can't pay the people who make the product.
(Repeat)
As a tech employer, I would not hire a liberal arts major for a technical position
As a programmer for ten years, I would definitely hire a liberal arts major for a programming position. After working alongside several and interviewing others, I have to echo the professor who wonders if his students have any kind of taste.
They may know the syntax. In fact anyone can learn that in a couple of weeks. What I keep running into, though, are programmers who can't program their way out of a paper bag, who would stare at me blankly if I quoted Brian Kernighan when he said "Controlling complexity is the essence of computer programming."
Actually lately it seems a liberal arts major is about as likely as a science major to know anything about design. But I will tell you that I would hire a gifted musician, painter, or journalist that shows the seed of understanding good design, over a humdrum programmer who's like, "If it runs it's good."
Those who don't understand history are doomed to repeat it.
Keep in mind the Nerval's Lobster who "submitted" this article is Dice themselves.
"Do Tech Firms Really Want Liberal Arts Majors?" No more than any other companies do. "Can someone with a liberal arts major expect to find easy employment with tech firms?" Probably not. If you've got some really solid interpersonal skills or other non-technical skill that a business can leverage for an advantage, then sure, you can get hired in tech. To be honest, if you're good enough at that sort of thing you can be hired anywhere. I don't see why tech would be so special. But if you read the Forbes article and decided to pursue a liberal arts degree as your path to being hired by a big up and coming tech company, you were a fool. In short, tech companies want people that can fill their business needs. And the degree is really only good at getting your foot in the door on your first job. After that, experience trumps all.
He got an MS in Rhetoric and then worked in various office admins roles for a while. Then he got a job writing documentation. This expanded over time to requirements gathering and test planning. All of which requires more of an ability to communicate with people both on the technical and non-technical side of the process.
So don't discount it. LA majors can contribute if they are given the correct jobs and allowed to grow into them.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
See subject: A little different than what you said, in that once you find what you ENJOY (which makes all the difference in the world on a job when you must work for others)? Learn about it ALL YOU CAN, all the way!
Which is easier once more understanding of a given field increases, just like working out with weights or running does once you become more proficient & the pain goes away (1st week hell, lol).
Then once you pass that barrier? Hey, imo + experience (especially in computing, I almost quit my 1st year in a CS program it was SO unlike what I'd taken before & at far more in-depth lower levels by far vs. my 1st degree in MIS)??
THEN - you "eat like mad" - learning more, tearing it up like candy since it's now something that actually interests you AND you understand it...
(... & perhaps, @ that point, it even allows for creativity as far as "art & science" combined in that area, allow (which only YOU set those limits on yourself... you, & time)).
APK
P.S.=> Why's my subject that? Look @ bikers of all people! The more 'serious ones' learn their harley - not just riding it, but building it from the ground up, understanding each part, for the self-sufficiency of FREEDOM of depending on others to do it for them, as it's their "horse" pretty much - I used to hang around with a pack of them in my younger days, & they ARE like that - a good ideal imo... apk
Please don't let your kids take liberal arts, you should see how much we laugh when we see a resume that is liberal arts and no tech experience wanting even BA job in a tech area. Dear liberal arts majors, you think i am hating you but I find you just too lazy to do real math, math is hard but it's important. I'd even prefer to hire a Fine Arts degree holder over you.
Want a job? Show you got the tech chops, even if all you have is grade 5, if you can build a robot , control it wireless with you phone etc and built it all from scratch, you got the job, don't care if you did not even finish say grade one.... Liberal arts - will that be fries with that.
There will never be enough hair dressers and telephone sanitizers,
The problem is there isn't a real standard as far as a liberal arts education is concerned. This wasn't always the case. There used to be a very rigorous coursework every bit as demanding as technical degrees. Math, science, music, logic, rhetoric, astronomy, anatomy, etc. the problem started when student loans became available from the government. There are a whole bunch of new students that have a bunch of money but no business in college. You can't place them in technical degrees because there are standards schools need to meet. So liberal arts was expanded and dumbed down at some schools to get all of this new money. There are still some great liberal arts programs out there but you better do your research so you aren't wasting your time and money.
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
Tech companies will certainly hire fresh liberal-arts grads for the same sorts of jobs liberal-arts grads fill in any company, and have for years. They will not (absent extraordinary extra-curricular experience) hire them for jobs requiring specialized skills like programming.
There's no need to pay engineer salaries to people not requiring engineering expertise.
Every single employee of your company is either an engineer or high-school grad? (Or a liberal arts major paid like a minimum-wage drone.)
I seriously doubt that.
And if you think liberal arts majors aren't trained to think logically, I don't know what to tell you. A decent liberal arts program most certainly covers that, just like any decent engineering program has some soft-skills in there.
The S and M in STEM (science and math), are both liberal arts.
has proven that they hate children and are working so hard to prevent children from learning. So hard. You're better off picking a random person than someone that has been permanently damaged beyond repair by the Republican education system in the US. Teachers in the US are so full of hate. So full. For example, right now they're refusing to teach children here in Seattle. Refusing. They hate children so much and are so dedicated to make sure children do not learn, that the Republican rulers of their union are not allowing any teachers to teach. Not allowing it. They hate us so much.
Can advertisers just buy stories on Slashdot?
No; that's precisely why you'll see these advertisements distinguished from Slashdot stories by color and text.
As long as it is a Dice shill posing this crap then apparently Slashdot's own policy on ads gets thrown out the window.
From the second paragraph of your same Wikipedia link:
It can also refer to studies on a liberal arts degree program. For example, Harvard University offers a Master of Liberal Arts degree, which covers biological and social sciences as well as the humanities.[4] For both interpretations, the term generally refers to matters not relating to the professional, vocational, or technical curriculum.
Ergo, you're not needed or wanted for a technical position/company. Thanks and have a nice life.
Translation: Stand up comedians need not apply.
To Create new technologies and modalityâ(TM)s of current technology requires more than rote memorization. You need both. You just can't pay for both as an American student. To find it its rare your more likely to push it aside even if you have one.
someone has to go out for the pizza!
Thanks Nerval's Lobster, for sharing the Forbes article with the Slashdot audience. There's a crucial distinction in the article that somehow is getting lost in the shouting. It's as follows: 1. Software engineering jobs are at the top of the pyramid in most young tech companies. No engineers = no product. Good (and great) engineers are incredibly productive and get paid accordingly. But ...
2. As companies grow, they don't need 10x the number of engineers for 10x the amount of revenue. Small teams of engineers are now incredibly productive. The new priorities involve hiring enough people to get the marketing right, get sales taken care of, do training and "customer success," etc. These jobs can be well-filled by non-technical people. At companies such as Facebook, Uber, etc., the hiring slots for such non-technical jobs are way bigger than the number of slots for engineers. Strange but true.
3. Everyone can coexist. It's just that the new equilibrium is different than it was 10 years ago. Companies grow faster. They pursue more ambitious agendas without needing 10,000 engineers to get there. There's more need for non-technical evangelists who can sell the rest of the world on what the engineers have built.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
But it seems he is off his meds, or is out on a temporary release from the loony bin this week. Or both.
I'd be careful hiring liberal arts majors. The traditional liberal arts degree was a good indication the holder could write well and formulate logical arguments. It wasn't the major you picked if you wanted an easy ride through college. The problem is so many schools have jettisoned much of the cannon with garbage self-validation and angry studies classes. Without a good understanding of the specific program you really don't know what you're getting.
> Not too long ago, a Forbes writer declared that a liberal arts degree had "become tech's hottest ticket."
I've been hearing this refrain every couple of years since I was in university. That was so long ago our connection to the world was BITNET.
Having worked in or for several dozen companies over that span, I've seen no indication that liberal arts are hired more or less than anyone else. I call BS.
If they have a decent github portfolio, I'd probably hire them. But then, I'd hire a high school dropout if they had a decent github portfolio. I value participation in open source projects much more than a piece of paper from some university. I've seen the kinds of programmers they produce.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Look, just because the paper says Doctor of Philosophy, it's really a tech degree in Biochem, Statistical Genetics, or Neuroscience. We just call it a Doctor of Philosphy, instead of Doctor of Science or Doctor of Medicine. We only use the latter two for specific disciplines.
Same goes for Bachelor of Arts. A BA does not mean you don't have a tech degree, it just means you're a Data Scientist or something that doesn't have a B.Sc.
Now, would you like an extra topping with that, sir?
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Yes that happened in some places like Detroit - don't blame the engineer for deliberate policy imposed by managers that are likely to have had a classical "liberal arts" background far more "well rounded" than today but were really just pricks who didn't care about the consequences when they set the policy.
As for the stereotype, many engineers of the late 1950s even had enough "liberal arts" to include a bit of latin, and in the current day while engineering students study far less non-engineering content there is often a mandatory amount of non-engineering content.
I RTFA, then looked up its author, George Anders.
Wikipedia says he has a bachelor's degree in economics from Sanford and his articles all seem to be about describing the accomplishments of others.
The problem with this whole discussion is the extreme specialization that goes on. Either you're an engineer who has taken a STEM degree and can only do technical tasks.
Or you've taken a liberal arts degree and thus can communicate...
Ideally, as an engineer, you take a wide array of liberal arts courses during your studies. It something I regret. My school was heavily tech focused, and we were allotted only a few electives each term. I thoroughly loved my philosophy and other classes.
Quite frankly, I could have used more liberal arts courses as part of my technical degree.
On the other hand, the vast majority of the students in the liberal arts classes had very little ability in the liberal arts, much less technical know how. It looked like a degree mill to me. But no doubt, there were some very good students and teachers as well.
In the end, unless you're going into some super niche background, it's probably best to do a technical path (engineering, computer science, medicine, nursing...) with a good liberal arts background.
Is there such a thing as conservative Arts?
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
I'm guessing one firm did it, and now they all want one. Give it a month, it'll be musicians.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Some years ago, I was hired into a team that does emergency support (including on the fly development and deployment) of software that runs manufacturing lines. The manager who hired me in really only cared about a few things: were we easy to work with, were we technically sound, could we learn quickly and absorb new things and adapt, could we solve the problems that the team was tasked with resolving. Almost everyone on the team really kicked ass at our jobs. Specifically, I really kicked ass at my job and was requested by name when a crisis would develop.
The original manager was replaced with a manager who had a different set of priorities. This new manager valued appearance over substance and had a very low technical ability. Specifically, I was called out in front of the team because my khakis weren't presentable enough in one instance (this was in the middle of working 7 days during a new project launch). Everything his subordinates did to keep the business running was practically invisible to this guy, all he had on his mind were bullshit things like what your clothes looked like and if you could bullshit about golf and whether or not you had a six sigma black belt.
This new manager even instituted desk audits. We would fail for things such as not having a keyboard labeled 'keyboard'. Having a PLC or line printer on our desk was an instant fail. The results of these audits were printed weekly on a plotter and displayed prominently in the office. We had no printed metrics tracking our line downtime.
My coworkers began to leave, seeing that the ship was about to hit the proverbial iceberg. Their replacements would be your typical "well-rounded" new hire, hand-selected by this idiot manager who wasn't looking for technical backgrounds in his candidates. I was tasked with bringing one of these new-hires up to speed. This new employee struggled with such lofty concepts as performing a simple select on the production database. I was essentially training a non-tech person for a highly technical role, at the direction of some idiotic manager who valued everything bides technical aptitude in his employees.
I was the fourth employee on the team to leave. Various people other than my manager had personally asked me to stay, seeing that the team was losing the people with expertise to actually solve the problems that the business faced. My direct manager welcomed my resignation. He had suggested multiple times that I had some mental issues to work through and didn't belong on his team. I was stunned at his reaction to my resignation, but it had told me I had made the right choice.
Before I left, I wrote an email to a couple people high up in engineering and operations. I specifically outlined how the business is being harmed by losing focus on what mattered in my specific department. Every word of it was true - we were focusing on bullshit instead of excelling in our role as support personnel for the in-house software and controls systems. I didn't get a response.
Fast forward a few months later, and I'm working in a new role at a different company. I'm enjoying having a semi normal boss again, and focusing on getting the job done instead of how my khakis look. As a bonus, my new manager doesn't even care about desk audits. Every call I get from my old company gets added to the block list on my phone, and there have been more than a few.
tl;dr - management trends toward being inept and values style over substance until the business starts falling down around them
Way to drum up the neckbeards by posting about how arts majors are getting tech jobs. Oh, sorry, you don't like the term 'neckbeard'? Well sorry, you don't have a right to not be offended.
Take your OWN advice & don't even TRY "impersonate" me... ok?
* You don't do a good job of it!
APK
P.S.=> Oh, & above ALL else? Grow up, get on topic, & stop being a damned immature TROLL!
... apk
Back in the 80's when I went to college, I had a choice of how to study what was called 'Computer & Information Science' in those days. I could go business, which meant lots of classes like accounting and statistics; engineering, which focused on electronics, materials, thermodynamics, etc., or I could go Liberal Arts. The advantage of going Liberal Arts was that I could still choose courses from business or engineering, but as long as I fulfilled the "distributional minima" for the CIS concentration, I was free to study pretty much anything else. So along with Symbolic Logic, Calculus, Logic Design, Programming Languages, etc., I also studied History, Psychology, Cartography, Geology, Astronomy...
My college (Rose Hulman), an all engineering and science one, required us to take ten humanities and social sciences (on a three quarter system). I had enough required math courses in my CS degree to have a built in math major, but I also took Music Theory and Early Twentieth Century American Literature. Admittedly, it's the only school I attended so my basis for comparison is pretty limited, but it doesn't seem like these were any kind of blow off classes either.
B.A. in Geography. Been working on the HP3000 for 31 years. But I had an A.S. in "Data Processing"* to back it up.
* The following year they renamed the degree to Computer Science, who'd know where I would be now if I continued studies for another year.
Tracy Johnson
Old fashioned text games hosted below:
http://empire.openmpe.com/
BT
There have been some corners of tech that have always welcomed the liberal arts majors. In my experience these are companies that have highly proprietary technology and they simply cannot get qualified grads fresh out of school. So they train their own.
Why not get a tech grad and simply give them the proprietary training, surely it would be simpler and easier? Well I don't entirely know. What I have gathered/surmised is as follows:
1). The liberal arts grads don't know much about tech and so the proprietary stuff doesn't bother them as much;
2). Jobs are hard to come by for the arts grads (also History, Philosophy, Fine Arts, Poli-Sci, and several others). The employers can pay them less, to state it bluntly;
3). Arts grads do have a sound general-purpose education. They have a brain, are literate, and have demonstrated enough focus and drive to complete an education. Therefore certain basics can be taken for granted.
If you need a plumber, you hire a plumber. If liberal arts majors are such savants at everything, why don't they go build a utopia and spend their free time jerking each other off? Sorry doc, I checked your cv and it your liberal arts are weak. Do you maybe have a nurse on staff versed in dead middle eastern languages... otherwise I'll have to take my cancer elsewhere.
X
Game software companies are more and more looking for arts majors rather than CS majors. People don't go for games that look like a geek did the artwork.