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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.
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.
We don't generally hate liberal arts ... in this case we just have no idea of why tech firms would be hiring people without tech skills.
Of course, in a browser with javascript disabled, the Forbes article renders as the oh-so-poetic "false", and I don't give a damn enough to click the dice link.
So, TFA is pretty much non-existent as far as I'm concerned, and it's mostly yet another article submitted by that Lobster guy which links to dice. At this point I just assume he works for dice but refuses to mention that/
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
No.
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/
As a tech employer, I would not hire a liberal arts major for a technical position, nor would their degree count for anything more than a HS diploma when hiring for a non-tech position. Liberal arts majors have not been trained to think logically and solve problems. They have also screwed up the one major life decision they have made so far: Their college major.
Also, I have no interest whatsoever in hiring "well-rounded" employees. They may be better people, and engage in interesting conversation at the water cooler, but they are not better employees, and are not going to add as much to the bottom line as a workaholic nerd with no social life.
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.
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I've found that the more people push their own academic and professional credentials, the less capable they are of actually getting real work done. I too don't give a flying rip what school you went to or what degree you got. Either you can do the work or you can't. And if you can't, you need to find some other job.
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.
Nor will they come in one morning with a shotgun and shoot the place up.
The worst mass shooting in US History was by an English major.
I just have a reflexive eye roll. My doctor says there's nothing he can do about that.
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.
Liberal arts majors get hired by the marketing department and put in charge of engineering. I had that unpleasant when I interviewed for a QA job at 3Dfx in 1997. No wonder that company crashed and burned a few years later.
OTOH, this is extremely rare and should be evaluated on a case basis.
Well rounded==absolutely no technical background.
Who gets to decide what 'well rounded' means? I took far more history than history majors took science. English as well.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
...It stands to reason that the only positions that can presently be legally hired in the US will come with a liberal arts background.
That happens whenever a company is making a commodity product. Avoid working for those companies. That should be common sense. If you work for a company where what you do _doesn't matter_, how do you expect they will treat you?
3Dfx was wrong about the commidification of video cards. Look what it got them.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
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."
Just ride it out. This crap will go the way of the Dodo, soon. As will Bennett.
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+
Your generalization of liberal arts graduates is almost as bad as your idea of an ideal workplace.
In a productive workplace the workers aren't drones that perform simple tasks as they are ordered from the top down. You end up with a CEO that knows nothing about technology deciding what technology to use on a product that has no value and doesn't work.
In a real productive environment there is open communication between all employees. People higher up explain problems they want to solve to the technical people and the technical people come up with ways to solve for the problem the other people didn't even know existed. Then they collaborate and decide what the best solution is. This way you solve the actual problem and do it in the most efficient way possible.
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There will never be enough hair dressers and telephone sanitizers,
Subject line came about because I had a catastrophic brain fart while listening to a conference call at work.
They have also screwed up the one major life decision they have made so far: Their college major.
Whether and when to go to college is a far more important. If liberal arts majors want to work in IT, there are always certifications. If you will not hire them, big deal.
Others will.
The Daddy casts sleep on the Baby. The Baby resists!
Now, now. Don't be talking facts to a liberal arts major, they don't like facts. They are cold and hard and liberal artsy people like warm and fuzzy.
Probably true, but if you work in a place where HR screens all resumes before you see them, and HR has bene programmed to select only people with certain degrees from certain schools (every company I have worked for does this, except one start-up), then that power is taken out of your hands.
HR more than anything else is creating the situation where only people with some kind of college degrees can apply to salaried positions, and where only top tier schools can be viewed for technical positions. It's wrong and needs to stop, but it is reality.
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.
There's definitely a difference in fields. "Liberal Arts" is a pretty broad catchall just like STEM, probably far moreso. There's also the importance of what the job is, and what duties it requires. Would you hire a Liberal Arts major as a core programmer who has no responsibilities outside of coding? Probably not, or at least not based even in part on that.
What about jobs that require more social interaction, writing/communication, or interaction with non-technical people? Working on the security side, I find you do need a lot of technical knowledge, but all that knowledge only goes so far if you can't explain to people, including your bosses/company executives/etc what things mean, and why they should take X or Y seriously. What about sales? What about getting proper requirements?
Sometimes, you really do need a guy who can translate between the customers and the engineers.
Honestly though, a true 'well rounded' individual these days isn't just someone versed in the liberal arts or STEM alone - it's someone who has a grounding in both.
But then if you do learn history, you learn we keep repeating it anyway.
'Professional' HR is the death of most startups.
I've seen an office going from a team that works into a nightmare of incompetent seat warmers in 2 years. The 2 years after the owner was convinced to delegate hiring to an HR pro.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
We don't generally hate liberal arts ... in this case we just have no idea of why tech firms would be hiring people without tech skills.
Perhaps because they want to stay in business, since tech firms that have only tech skills can't do anything else, like run a business.
Somebody's gotta babysit all the pencil necks.
Just because something is taught out of 'Arts and Sciences' does not make it a 'liberal art'. Much as LA types want to claim them.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Yeah, why is that engineering majors need art history to be well rounded but art history majors don't need vector calculus for the same reason?
As a tech employer, I would not hire a liberal arts major for a technical position, nor would their degree count for anything more than a HS diploma when hiring for a non-tech position. Liberal arts majors have not been trained to think logically and solve problems. They have also screwed up the one major life decision they have made so far: Their college major.
Also, I have no interest whatsoever in hiring "well-rounded" employees. They may be better people, and engage in interesting conversation at the water cooler, but they are not better employees, and are not going to add as much to the bottom line as a workaholic nerd with no social life.
Where to even begin. There is NO correlation between one's major, and one's social life. English Majors are just as likely to be closeted freaks as Math or CS majors. There is a correlation between the work produced by those that can think creatively and those that are just code monkeys. If you run a sweat shop, that's your business. But for most industries, having soft skills are critical to being able to do your job well. Most of the best coders I've ever worked with were not CS majors, although a few were. One was even a Philosophy PhD. Gasp. Also, judging people positively because they chose college to be job training instead of as a time to expand one's education is onerous, to say the least.
The only thing worse than a Democrat is a Republican.
No, the worst mass shooting in US history was by the sons of farmers, ranchers and merchants.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
You are welcome on my lawn.
Are you the new "Moo Cow"?
Perhaps you should educate yourself on what the Liberal Arts are, as "liberal" has nothing to do with modern politics.
The liberal arts (Latin: artes liberales) are those subjects or skills that in classical antiquity were considered essential for a free person (Latin: liberal, "worthy of a free person") to know in order to take an active part in civic life, something that (for Ancient Greece) included participating in public debate, defending oneself in court, serving on juries, and most importantly, military service. Grammar, logic, and rhetoric were the core liberal arts, while arithmetic, geometry, the theory of music, and astronomy also played a (somewhat lesser) part in education.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberal_arts_education
Your posting illustrates that fact that a classical and rigorous liberal arts education has not been obtainable in America for some years. You don't even know what it is and what such a preparation can do for employment.
Another problem is that education is conflated with training. US students look to college for training, when they should be looking for an education.
Having said that, current "liberal arts" graduates are unemployable, except in the joke sense of being capable of inquiring whether fries are desired.
Prove anything by multiplying Huge Number times Tiny Number
because they put themselves in positions to define what well-rounded means. If only tech nerds cared about political battles instead of ... vector calculus.
Intersting point, I think many of us think the issue is hiring people with soft core liberal arts degrees. As someone who has hired folk, and I know this is not the room for such admissions, I looked a little, um, sideways if someone chose to major in Graffiti Sciences on purpose.
... oh, wait.
Grumble grumble... Damned Applied Arts.
It may be untrue, but one of your first big independent decisions in life should indicate you can read, particularly read a chart showing the expected demand for new hires for a particular major.
Oh God, here come the flames, they burn, dammit, they burn. Say, who taught all these History of Matchsticks majors how to
Pretending this is my office full of bitter coworkers..
There will always be more idiots clucking. We should continue to ignore them.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Translation: Stand up comedians need not apply.
It's still out there. They just have to look for it.
University of Chicago in particular has stuck to it's guns regarding classic liberal arts education.
The damn jebbies beat a better than average college liberal arts education into me in HS, fuckers.
99% of LA education is all about the party.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Source, please? That's a hell of a claim.
There have been numerous studies showing that there are strong correlations between certain MBTI types and certain majors; I'm not saying MBTI is a proxy for "social life", but at least introversion/extroversion play into types of interaction in social life.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
Perhaps you should educate yourself on what the liberal arts are today, as opposed to the 1920s.
You describe 'classic liberal arts' education. An almost extinct school.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
The paragraph I quoted from Wikipedia was for Ancient Greece (500-336 B.C.E.). That's 2,500 years ago, not the 1920's. The word "liberal" meant "free man". That's what is missing from today's liberal arts programs.
all that knowledge only goes so far if you can't explain to people, including your bosses/company executives/etc what things mean
Do you have any evidence at all that liberal arts majors are better at "explaining things"?
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.
Liberal arts majors have not been trained to think logically and solve problems.
The liberal arts deal fundamentally with the human equation.
The engineer of the late 1950s plans a multi-lane expressway downtown.
He tunes out anyone who complains that the waterfront would be severed from the city, healthy neighborhoods splintered or paved over and the poor walled in. He also ignores any objections that the signature sky-way to be built over the harbor would become insanely dangerous to drive in winter and prohibitively expense to maintain.
He is blind to the social consequences of his actions. His designs are technically sound --- but only in the narrow sense that his sky-way won't collapse in a heavy wind. It won't be navigable by anything less than a convoy with an army reserve escort, but at least it won't fall down.
Also, I have no interest whatsoever in hiring "well-rounded" employees. They may be better people, and engage in interesting conversation at the water cooler, but they are not better employees, and are not going to add as much to the bottom line as a workaholic nerd with no social life.
The bottom line depends on your ability to conceive, produce and maintain a marketable product or service. You don't expect an alcoholic to be creative, productive, or self-disciplined. Obsession does not yield clarity.
The only virtue of a workaholic nerd is that he is easily and cheaply replaced as soon as he burns out.
Liberal arts majors have not been trained to think logically and solve problems.
I took symbolic logic in the philosophy department. There was lots of logic in other philosophy classes. Not so much solving problems, maybe, but lots of shooting down bad ideas.
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"Math is hard."
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.
I do, but when I first started it was a lot like what the parent thinks is ideal. We were basically code monkeys and made whatever our sales team sold, and they basically just let the clients come up with the designs. We knew our products were terrible but the people higher up thought they were fine. We had a very high turnover.
We fought really hard to change that. It wasn't easy at all. We finally convinced them with a prototype we made on our own time that blew away the terrible stuff we had been making. We showed it to the CEO and other higher ups and it impressed them enough to change how we did things.
Now our productivity is exponentially higher, our products are awesome and practically sell themselves, and we have much lower turnover.
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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! --
Nor will they come in one morning with a shotgun and shoot the place up.
The worst mass shooting in US History was by an English major.
Stop saying mean things about Dick Cheney.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Hey now, Cheney was responsible for the best public shooting in America - he shot a lawyer in the face with a shotgun. Props where they're due!
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Since when are there Republicans in Seattle?
As did we in the view of some by not studying law, not going into real estate and not getting rich by drawing tattoos on teenagers.
For a general career in an office, retail, etc an arts degree is far better than high school alone.
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APK
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.
In a parallel universe, this question was asked on slashart: "why is it that art history majors need Calculus to be well rounded but engineering majors don't need to take 17th Century Baroque Masters for the same reason?"
In modern times, liberal arts education is a term that can be interpreted in different ways. It can refer to certain areas of literature, languages, art history, music history, philosophy, history, mathematics, psychology, and science.
What's really sad is that pointing out a poor choice of terminology (e.g. liberal arts) is considered and "attempt to appear superior" by some people. I suppose anything can seem like an attempt to appear superior if you are dumb enough.
Is it impossible for you to admit you are wrong?
I am merely pointing out that the term "liberal arts" is a poor choice of label for majors that don't math and science, because they specifically include those subjects.
In the same way that "STEM" is used to refer to a group of subjects, maybe a similar acronym can be made for all the majors that a naive person might imagine when thinking of "liberal arts".
Or maybe we can just call it "[^STEM]" to make a nerdy programming reference to regular expressions.
Yeah, sounds like you're describing that bastard engineer Robert Moses.
Oh, wait, Moses's degrees were in political science.
Facts are stubborn things.
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.
O oo oo the most pedantic person in the room HIRE THEM!!!!!
Hardly, he used the wrong definition of "mass shooting" for the context! It was a false pedanticism.
English majors may shoot a lot of people, but at least they're less likely to commit this type of verbal horror.
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."
What do you expect, most of the people commenting don't even know what a "liberal arts education" means, who gets one, if they might be receiving a technical degree, or what the English language is.
I doubt most of these schmucks actually received a lofty enough degree to warrant their snobbery. I mean, if they don't value a liberal arts education, it seems like that would put them more in the "not for me" category than the "I know about this subject, and have some sort of expert opinion."
They should just take people's word for it that learning about humanity has value to humaans.
When I worked in GIS, the "big boss" was a geography major. Believe it or not, that worked.
sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f(q{sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f});
That is nonsense, liberal arts is alive and well in the US, even if most of the people in this thread don't understand the term. Most of the people engaging in a liberal arts education don't understand the term either, and that is nothing to be concerned about because the term doesn't have direct utility for students outside of Education majors.
Here in Oregon most of our civil engineers received a Liberal Arts education along with their science degrees at high quality public institutions, and they were designing awesome solutions to traffic problems from the Oregon Trail all the way to modern times. Even in the 1950s. Making sure that neighborhoods are well served by changes is part of the planning process, it is a technical specialty. I have heard these stories of cities where the people doing that part of the job did fall-on-their-faces-bad jobs. But don't blame engineering generally.
As a tech employer, I would not hire a liberal arts major for a technical position, nor would their degree count for anything more than a HS diploma when hiring for a non-tech position. Liberal arts majors have not been trained to think logically and solve problems. They have also screwed up the one major life decision they have made so far: Their college major.
Also, I have no interest whatsoever in hiring "well-rounded" employees. They may be better people, and engage in interesting conversation at the water cooler, but they are not better employees, and are not going to add as much to the bottom line as a workaholic nerd with no social life.
Yep, from an employer's point of view the more generally ignorant a worker is the better and the less of a life they have the better.
After thirty years of no working for assholes who couldn't give a shit about the people that work for them I can only say, on behalf of your employees that either don't know any better or don't dare - fuck you.
blindly antisocialist = antisocial
Try the word "much".
It's shorter by several orders of magnitude, quadratically easier to type, and as a bonus it's directly proportional to having the right meaning.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
An education isn't marketable. Training is marketable. For most employers, a GPA of 3.8 and a pile of horse shit have the same value as the pile of horse shit by itself. Sure, it might help you slightly when you go to get your first job out of college, but most "entry level" jobs seem to require 2 years' experience in the role.
When a higher education didn't cost more than some peoples' first houses, having an "education" was meaningful. Nowadays any college that is graduating students with no directly marketable skills (but plenty of "education") is useless. BSCS holders should be able to take a computer apart and put it back together, program in at least three languages fluently, design an efficient and manageable database schema, and have contributed to or started at least one open source project. Knowing theory is useful in addition to those skills, but not valuable in and of itself. Every programming job description I see has the requirement "BSCS or equivalent experience". What that means to me is that it's the skills, not the theory, that they're most interested in.
"Education" is great, but at the end of the day, you need to eat.
Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups.
Hey, C-student English majors need jobs too! Without HR they'd starve!
Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups.
Then, after that, learn a skill which people will actually pay you to use. If you enjoy it, either there's something wrong with you or someone is taking advantage of you.
Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups.
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.
The problem isn't liberal art as a discipline. But the fact most liberal art majors are drifters who weren't disciplined, and drift by the classes and bluff their way to a degree, they went to that degree because it is hard to bluff your way in math classes. If a student takes the classes seriously than liberal arts is an effective discipline for a good well rounded behavior that the Tech industry is missing... However too many of them go into that degree because it is a few degrees that has such a lax math requirement.
I am at a stance that all majors should be required to take up to Calc II (And no Calc classes for non-tech majors watered down classes)
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Sad, but true. My point is that the type of training you describe can be obtained outside a traditional university with its bloated costs. You can get what you need at a much cheaper local technical college, online, or through work experience. I think Peter Thiel is on to something.
Prove anything by multiplying Huge Number times Tiny Number
While you're not wrong, the problem there is this:
Joe went to a four-year "traditional" college for his training.
Bob went to a community college for his (identical) training.
Which one gets hired? (Hint: Not Bob.)
Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups.
RedSteve's reply above mine is right: Vector Calculus and and (intro) Art History classes are in no way equivalent. The College Algebra or Intro Statistics that Liberal Arts majors are required to take IS roughly equivalent to the Art History (or other Liberal Arts GE classes) that STEM majors are required to take.
I'm pretty sure the privacy destroying abominations are caused by the management and business people ... you know, the sociopaths in charge.
I'm sorry, but I have yet to meet the corporate analog to a position involving thoughtful introspection about corporate motivations to guide the company towards optimizing fondness and responsibility.
So you'll pardon me for thinking that your notion of someone skilled in self reflection will make any fucking difference in how companies are ran.
Greedy bastards focusing only on this quarter to maximize their bonuses are the ones who make these kinds of decisions. And they're not gonna listen to the warm-and-fuzzy crowd.
If you think a couple of liberal arts majors will change corporate behavior you're out of your mind.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
So you would not hire me, a history Ph.D. with fifteen years of programming experience, because of my degree. Experience and proven ability count for nothing, I guess, in your world, if you don't have the right papers.
Not all liberal arts majors are English majors, which is the stereotype being perpetrated here.
This thread certainly hasn't shown it. People arguing from 2500 year old, obsolete definitions.
Never seen you do it. Science is not an art of any kind. Math is not an art of any kind.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
I have a BA from the College of Liberal Arts, University of Minnesota. My major was mathematics, and I indeed learned a lot of math.
So, I've got a liberal arts degree, but I learned some pretty good tech skills in my degree program.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Computer science is about computers in the same way astronomy is about telescopes. A computer science graduate need not know anything about computer internals, should be able to program in various ways (procedural, OO, and functional at least) and pick up a new language fairly quickly, and should understand the theory behind databases. The graduate will doubtless have more specialized skills as well.
A software engineering graduate should be able to program reasonably fluently in a few languages, and should be competent in the ideas behind software development.
I don't know where anybody teaches your idea of CS.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
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
A good university teaches people how to think. I'd rather employ someone from MIT with a 1st in any degree subject than someone from Cov Poly with their best academic qualification.
I'm also not the only one.
Every programming job description I see has the requirement "BSCS or equivalent experience".
Been there, applied for that. "Do you have a degree in computer science?" Nope. "Oh. What degree do you have?" "Where is that from?"
My 'fuck all to do with computing in any sense' degree from a Russell Group university got the (quoted exactly) response, "That'll do nicely."
At the same time, anybody that mandates a degree in an IT job is a fuckwit anyway. A degree tells me you've been taught to think, and assessed on those grounds. Several years experience in the domain tells me you've got several years experience in the domain. Either is great.
Marketers always think they are on the verge of commodification, so their jobs will be the important ones.
Eventually they are right.
But 3Dfx? They thought they were on the verge of commodification in a 5 year old niche. Morons.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
I realize that you probably will never read this, Bill. But I've seen your posts on here for years, and while I've disagreed with you many times and at other times appreciated your insightfulness, this post... well, I've just lost all respect for you.
I don't give a crap what some piece of paper says -- I just care if someone can do a job. I've met liberal arts majors who are the smartest people I know, and I've met science/eng/tech majors who are so dumb that I marvel how they could ever have finished a degree. And vice versa. If I see a liberal arts major who appears to have the skills, I'm interested -- whatever their background. And frankly, I'm already interested in someone who chooses an unusual college major anyway, because they strike me as a potentially more interesting person who might have the foresight to actually CARE about something, rather than just checking the box for, "Uh, business major" or whatever. People who have some sort of initiative and an ability to make a choice (even a less common one) have already shown me that they have initiative to do something most other college majors can't... which is to care about something intellectually. If I'm hiring someone for a job that needs to THINK at ALL, I want someone with a prior history of thought.
Sure -- I'm not denying that there are plenty of liberal arts majors who are idiots out there. But I would never summarily reject someone for that or claim that all such degrees count as much as a high school diploma.
Then CS is a dead-end as far as immediate practical employment is concerned - which, when you're facing $100,000 in loans, is far more important than faffing about with theory.
Like I was saying, the days where the kind of education that most CS departments have been providing is useful are rapidly approaching zero. It's too expensive to waste your time like that. While a certain amount of theory makes your practical skills more useful, if you can't get a job the day you graduate, then it's a waste of time.
Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups.
The difference is that you probably didn't spend six figures while you were getting that experience. I'm hoping you were paid for it.
My point is that the degree is useless, it matters if you have a marketable skill set. If you're leaving college without the ability to find a job in a reasonable amount of time (a couple months) then either you or your college is doing it wrong.
Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups.
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.
In addition to being very old definitions, they are also current definitions (i.e. the fact that Math and Science are part of the definition of "liberal arts" hasn't changed). You also seem to be confusing the definition of "liberal arts" with the common definition for "art".
You may as well argue that people with Ph.D.s are all medical doctors that are also good at philosophy.
And to be clear, you are definitely wrong.
I'm pretty sure the privacy destroying abominations are caused by the management and business people ... you know, the sociopaths in charge.
I wouldn't call Zuck a sociopath, but I suppose that's a point.
If you think a couple of liberal arts majors will change corporate behavior you're out of your mind.
Given that liberal arts majors are the ones responsible for hipster-tech like Ello and Etsy, I'd say it can work. Whether or not it'll take over the world is another issue.
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Liberal arts majors have not been trained to think logically and solve problems.
Well, I'm not sure what sorts of Liberal Arts people you've encountered, but logical thinking is something a good Liberal Art's degree should certainly teach. And to much greater depth than an engineering or cs degree.
PHIL 0540. Logic.
An introduction to perhaps the most fundamental tool of rational thought: deductive logic. Course begins with basic sentential logic, then moves on to deduction, quantification, and prediction. Argumentation and reasoning may also be addressed at times. No previous experience with logic or philosophy is required.
PHIL 1630. Mathematical Logic.
This course provides a rigorous introduction to the metatheory of classical first-order predicate logic. Topics covered include the syntax, formal semantics, and proof theory of first-order logic, leading up to the completeness theorem and its consequences (the compactness and Lowenheim-Skolem theorems). There will be some discussion of philosophical issues, but the focus of the course will be on the technical material. This course provides a more rigorous and mathematical treatment of material covered in PHIL 0540. No previous familiarity with logic is required, but it may be taken after 0540.
PHIL 1880. Advanced Deductive Logic.
This course provides an introduction to the metatheory of first-order logic. We will prove the completeness of first-order logic. We then move on to the major "limitative" results, including the undecidability of first-order logic, the Gödel incompleteness theorems, and the undefinability in arithmetic of arithmetical truth. Prerequisite: PHIL 0540 or instructor's permission.
That is just a few I pulled from random from Brown's philosophy web site. I major'd in Anthro, minor'd in philosophy and chemistry, and almost minor'd in math. (couldn't decide what I liked). This may be unique to my school (a top 50 liberal arts school), but my chem/math/physics courses did not attempt to teach the fundamentals of logic. We solved a bunch of problems, sure. But all that did was give your practice solving equations. The approach to solving the problem, the methods employed, all the historical various ways you could approach a problem etc.. were largely left up to each individual student to work out.
However, the advanced logic philosophy courses.... jeez. Talk about brain stretching. You were trained to take highly 'grey' subject matter, not black/white problems like 1+2=2, and reduce them logically to basically an equation you could solve.
I know a lot of very narrow minded Engineers. They might be great at solving problems in their area of expertise, but they fail hard when they attempt to extend those problem solving abilities to things like politics or social issues. Ditto with Physicians/Surgeons. They are very well trained, and can solve hundreds of different complex medical issues, that they feel like "well of course I can decide whether food stamps make sense given xyz". Well... usually no. They will not be aware of how complex the issue is, and tend to approach the problem way too simply. Like physicians who say losing weight is "only calories in, calories out". Well.... true. True in the sense that you have identified the main equation that governs fat buildup. But completely worthless when solving the real world equation "how can I get this person to lose weight".
Liberal arts/social sciences/philosophy etc.. is much better equipped to provide an actual useful real world answer that accounts of all the 'grey' areas that oftentimes cannot be reduced to simple equations.