Ask Slashdot: Any Place For Liberal Arts Degrees In Tech? 392
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?
Um (Score:2, Insightful)
Not many.
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Re:Um (Score:4, Interesting)
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...
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Re:Um (Score:5, Funny)
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Well, somebody has to answer the main phone line, sign for packages, and clean the breakroom....
Dual degrees (Score:2, Interesting)
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I majored in physics, but at a very liberal-arts-focused school. So, I guess I've got both. I think it's served me well in the field: I've built web sites, been in tech support, run my own indie MMO, done a lot of random programming, and I'm currently a server admin.
Believe it or not, the most helpful classes may have been art history. Journalism and philosophy didn't hurt, especially Symbolic Logic, which was a philosophy class.
Re:Dual degrees (Score:4, Funny)
I majored in physics, but at a very liberal-arts-focused school.
They taught you a quantum of English necessary for relativistic writing?
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I majored in physics, but at a very liberal-arts-focused school. So, I guess I've got both. I think it's served me well in the field: I've built web sites, been in tech support, run my own indie MMO, done a lot of random programming, and I'm currently a server admin.
Believe it or not, the most helpful classes may have been art history. Journalism and philosophy didn't hurt, especially Symbolic Logic, which was a philosophy class.
One of the most useful books I read in college was an art history book, Mechanization Takes Command, by Sigfried Giedion. (Here's a sample http://www.ediblegeography.com... [ediblegeography.com] you might be able to find the complete edition online).
He taught me about how technology changed things -- when that technology was first steam and then electricity. I learned about the Bauhaus from that. It's pretty insightful to learn about engineering from a historical perspective, starting with stone axes, the way an art historian lo
I wouldn't bother (Score:3)
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.
Re:Dual degrees (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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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.
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.
The thing that really makes me chuckle is the hypocrisy in the two statements I quote above. I actually think the entirety of your post is brilliant until the last couple sentences, where you go from making very enlightened points showcasing a different point of view to just being someone with a chip on your shoulder.
While filling your whole software shop with nothing by STEM graduates on purpose is nothing to be proud of, it wouldn't be a tragedy either. STEM degrees range from Computer Science, Mathematic
Ya, but... (Score:5, Insightful)
... tech CEOs want employees with liberal arts degrees, because those graduates have critical thinking skills.
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I came here to say this... +1!
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Some do, but the stereotype of IT having a myopic view of technology and projects didn't spring from nowhere. If you've worked in IT you've met many people who don't have strong critical thinking skills or the broader view needed for many projects.
*I* just want to code -- let others with liberal arts degrees be management.
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In my experience, that's not a lack of critical thinking skills.
It's a lack of a breadth of education, and a complete lack of maturity and wisdom.
The problem is a lot of people come out of a STEM degree with a minor god complex, and are completely incapable of recognizing when their book learning doesn't match real world experience, and the stuff they're digging in their heels about doesn't work so w
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My degree is applied music and work in tech mostly because teacher's salaries suck. My success isn't from anything other than a willingness to learn {oh and common sense}.
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*I* just want to code -- let others with liberal arts degrees be management.
Ugh, and that's the resulting problem. People who can't hack it with the actual labor but seem to try hard get promoted to management where they fulfill The Gervais Principle [http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-or-the-office-according-to-the-office/].
This isn't just an IT problem. This happens in various ways in most companies after they reach a certain size. My dad was an equiptment operator (backhoe, grounds keeper, etc) for the state, and his bosses were nearly retarded, but no on
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Yeah, no kidding ... I'm pretty sure you can't get a STEM degree without critical thinking skills.
However, some of the Poli Sci majors I've met have precisely zero critical thinking skills, and mostly just parrot whichever rhetoric they adopted in their second year of school for the rest of their lives.
I'm not saying liberal arts students don't have the chance to develop critical thinking skills. But I am saying anybody who thinks STEM graduates don't have them is clueless.
I've lost count of the number of
Re:You guys are always entertaining! (Score:5, Insightful)
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. ;-)
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Well, we are, on the aggrigate, delusional and self aggrandizing.
Very, very delusional and very, very self aggrandizing. You see it in every topic.
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Exactly what I wanted to say. In fact, to get a STEM degree, you are required to have critical thinking and problem solving skills. A Liberal Arts degree just means you took a bunch of classes that didn't amount to much of anything else, but you wanted a piece of paper so that's the one you get. That implies a lack of critical thinking, not an abundance of it.
I'm biased but ... (Score:2)
My undergrad work was in English and psychology, my grad work in philosophy, and it's done me fine. There's never been an instance where I wished I'd had a computer "science" class. Nor have my most capable colleagues been from computer science, on the whole. The comp sci grads tend to have very narrow views of how to do things, which doesn't work out so well in the real world. You have to like to learn to be good here. The liberal arts are far more capable of cultivating that attitude. Comp sci folks, in m
Re:Ya, but... (Score:4, Insightful)
Hrmmm. Just some random thoughts, as someone with a film degree that also codes and has a highly technical job -- I am a sound designer and a recording engineer. I will to some extent generalize, but that's what we're doing here.
1) I've noticed that people can have really extensive technical knowledge but really not have any concept of social context or even the social utility of what they do. Indeed they'll often argue that the social utility is meaningless when compared to some teleological "search for knowledge," which is portrayed as valueless and objectively good, and questions of economy and competing interests are morally inferior.
2) STEM people can be total philistines. They'll often deride art and creative pursuits as somehow less essential or necessary than the cause of science and progress. They don't seem to understand that "progress" itself is a moral concept deeply embedded within a complex philosophical value system, and indeed a lot of STEM people know nothing of philosophy or epistemology, and think the entire enterprise of philosophy is some sort of academic scam. I love me some Neil DeGrasse Tyson, but he's completely put the foot in his mouth on several occasions when he thinks he's talking about philosophy of science [huffingtonpost.com], and I loved the new Cosmos but his depictions of certain historical events, particularly about Giordano Bruno, were glib and lacked rigor or sensitive knowledge.
3) I've noticed that a lot of people with an engineering or medical background are subject to many forms of woo, quackery and crank ideas [rationalwiki.org]. Whenever someone prints a list of "scientists" who oppose Evolution/Global Warming/Old Universe, take your pick, the list is generally chock full of engineer Ph.Ds.
4) Relatedly, I've noticed a lot of engineers are dilettantes who tend to see all problems in the world as simply problems of applied computer science, who don't respect professional expertise or knowledge, or respect the fact that things in the world can fundamentally differ in kind from the problems of science and engineering.
5) Some STEM people can be highly dogmatic, if you ever get into an argument with one over some point they will not let go of, eventually they'll resort to some form of scientism, and insist that the thing you believe is false because its existence cannot be falsified. An important part of exposing yourself to art and creativity is acknowledging that you can't prove beauty exists falsifiably, and everyone can argue over wether this or that tulip is beautiful, but beauty exists.
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PS. On (3), I don't think it's any accident that the government of the People's Republic of China is made up of engineers to a large extent [singularityhub.com], or that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and many Iranian politicians are engineers, or that many members of the Muslim Brotherhood (including Ayman al-Zawahiri) are medical doctors.
STEM fields give intelligent people a way of working in the world that will not fundamentally challenge their philosophy or beliefs.
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Impressive. You have weaponized STEM envy.
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Avation (learn to fly a plan)
Physical Education (you get to be a high school gym teacher)
Parks and recreation management (be an events coordinator at a local park or if you are lucky a park ranger with the NPS)
All of these were liberal arts programs, all of them had the same general education requirements as a STEM or any other degree, and all of them were much more voc
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Based on my college experience (and comments from friends who went to different colleges), getting a BA in just about any field doesn't actually require critical thinking skills, much less imply that the person would have them. Professors love handing out A's, and there's never a lack of extra credit or makeup work, so about the only way you're not going to get a 3.4+ is by outright missing classes left and right.
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This would be true, in theory, but in reality, most colleges are so crappy that people pass English Lit by conforming to the instructor's biases. It is an exercise in figuring out how the boss thinks - not in doing your own critical thinking.
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Sounds like it's preparing students to enter the workforce just fine then.
Game programmers ??? (Score:3, Interesting)
... 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.
Now if you want to talk about game designers then english lit may be a ve
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Anyone with a degree in English Lit. SHOULD have critical thinking skills, especially if they went to a decent college. CS grads should also have critical thinking skills.
They need to clarify the word "critical thinking" because it is just another buzz word that people keep using nowadays. To me, there are various type of "critical thinking" and how to apply to different situations. Of course, English Lit grad "critical thinking" could be different from STEM grad (both the approach and solution). So it is not easy to say either way is better unless the definition is clear.
English lit. grads with decent programming skills would probably make for good gamer programmers, rather than simplistic scenarios.
If an English Lit grad has decent programming skills, I would be very confused why the person would ge
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If an English Lit grad has decent programming skills, I would be very confused why the person would get the degree in English Lit in the first place???
Why does anyone get an English Lit degree? (I know some other people here might ask that question seriously.) Other than those who go on to grad school and then become professors of English literature, or maybe high school teachers, why would anyone major in English Lit? (And even if you wanted to become a high school teacher, do you really need a full-blown degree in English Lit? It's not like you're going to be debating the complex structure of Joyce's Ulysses or doing a radical post-structuralist rea
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So solution isn't to give STEM degrees better courses for writing?
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When doing critical thinking for stuff like programming, there is few "proper" ways of solving an issue, but in the more "arts" kind of classes, things were more o
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When doing critical thinking for stuff like programming, there is few "proper" ways of solving an issue
1. there are a few "proper" ways of solving *some* problems.
2. Somebody had to discover/invent those proper ways of solving those problems.
3. This method of discovering ways to solve problems needs to be taught to people in addition to application of existing solutions.
This view of "programming" is very narrow. It's true that some programmers can only do mundane jobs, but equating all programmers to this level is like equating construction workers with architects and structural engineers because the all
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Nearly all solutions are simple given a well defined problem.
Nearly all solutions are simple given a well defined problem. I tend to "reinvent" solutions all the time. When I started playing with multi-threading, I was toying around with lots of different ways to handle locking and trying to safely handle sync without locks. Seems everything that I discovered on my own has already been done before, typically decades ago back in the 60s and 70s, but it doesn't mean I had to have someone else "discover" it for me. The solutions were blindingly obvious for anyone who sp
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Employees with STEM degrees might also believe (incorrectly) that they can do the job without learning anything new, which makes them less useful. Employees without STEM degrees may be less susceptible to this since it's clear to them that they've got a lot to learn.
Not saying this is always the case, but I think it's a factor sometimes.
You mean like the 125 comments so far in this article, from STEM grads insisting that the coursework to earn their degree has prepared them perfectly for any possible situation in the real world? Yeah... about that...
Re:Ya, but... (Score:4, Insightful)
Can you back that up with data?
http://joshblackman.com/blog/2013/10/28/which-undergraduate-majors-score-the-highest-on-lsat/
The best post-undergrad standardized test for critical thinking skills is the LSAT. Looking at the scores broken down by major, more STEM degrees appear in the upper half, but some, like Computer Science, don't fare too well, getting beaten by many non-STEM fields.
Its worth noting that those taking the LSAT fall into the "I want to be a lawyer" category... and then please direct your attention to where "Pre law" is on the list. The scores on this list are from people self-selected for wanting to make the leap from whatever undergrad degree they had, to law school. Pre-law scores are below average because *everyone* who got a Pre Law undergrad now has to go to law school and therefore must take the LSAT. Selection bias is funny like that. Meanwhile, people with other undergrad degrees either have a deep passion/talent for law (providing the inspiration for succeeding on the LSAT) or they simply ignore law school and do whatever else it is they graduated to do.
If you picked people at random (regardless of intention of going to law school) and sat them for the LSAT, you would get useful data. Please only interpret this as tacit disagreement with the premise that your data demonstrates the value non-STEM degrees; I am not trying to comment at all on the actual value of said degrees.
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Can you back that up with data?
http://joshblackman.com/blog/2013/10/28/which-undergraduate-majors-score-the-highest-on-lsat/
The best post-undergrad standardized test for critical thinking skills is the LSAT. Looking at the scores broken down by major, more STEM degrees appear in the upper half, but some, like Computer Science, don't fare too well, getting beaten by many non-STEM fields.
Go find a STEM major to explain selection bias and other related systematic errors in field of statistics. ;-)
Gee I do not know. (Score:5, Funny)
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.
Let's see your portfolio. (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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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.
Exactly. I've met plenty of people with degrees in X who have little practical experience when they're fresh out of school. They may have some sort of vague theoretical sense of the field, but even that can be very nebulous, since real understanding without doing is rather difficult.
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.
THIS. Especially if you're more than 5 years out of school, I'd barely give a crap what your major was unless you've actually been working in that area.
That's one of a number of things I'd add to the college major:
(1) How
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To take the opposing view:
I know someone who got hired to do tech writing for an embedded systems company who was finishing off a combined CS and English Lit. degree, and had already generated a Liberal Arts certificate based on the cross-discipline work they needed for that.
I also remember the intense difficulty most people in CS had with writing a critical paper on ANYTHING.
I think the end result is that it doesn't really matter which degree the person has: what's important is that they can display that
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OK, but what if they have a degree in English Lit and significant Open Source contributions relevant to the job? What if they have a CS degree but wrote stories for the student paper, and won an award for that?
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One can always "what if" the situation to weigh in favor of whichever side you want. It's that "significant" and "relevant to the job" that's the cheat in your example. Let's say the CS major had significant course projects that were relevant to the job as well or just drop the significant and relevant from the E Lit candidate.
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It depends where the degree is from. If it's from CMU (Carnegie Mellon University) then it means a lot. If it's from "CMU" (Central Michigan University) then less so. If it's from "CMU" (Certificate Mill University) then it isn't worth shit.
Writing (Score:4, Informative)
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.
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What classes do you take? (Score:5, Interesting)
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?
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But how many people with LA degrees have mastered these?
How many people with B.S. degrees have mastered any of their core competencies*? The vast majority of skills I use day to day as an EE I learned or mastered on the job. Pretty much everyone I knew in college started their careers with lots of training or menial tasks.
*of which there are apparently far fewer of than in LA
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The idea that the aim of education should be professional mastery and specialization is very modern and has significant detractors, particularly among those who would say that it simply turns the University into a factory that produces graduates like goods.
Also this debate happens in the context of middle-class university education. The children of the rich are absolutely still getting rigorous liberal arts educations, as this seems to be a prerequis
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More like mocking those that supposedly follow his teachings and yet froth at the mouth when it comes to bombing foreigners.
Tech writer (Score:2)
Assuming the liberal arts major has something on the ball, tech writer. If it's just an average liberal arts major then simply no.
At least they had a good time in college.
Get any degree but have the experience (Score:2)
Basically, if you have the knowledge - and can demonstrate it, then your degree will not matter all that much.
Unless of course, you are trying for an extremely competitive position, being choosen by non-tech people.
Common sense (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
Of course there are - (Score:2)
There are kitchens to be staffed, trash cans to be emptied and phones to be answered. All of those things require highly talented individuals who are going to be paying off student debt for eternity making low wages.
Joking aside, the degree matters a lot less or not at all when I hire people. What I am looking for is the ability to think which is unrelated to school and in many cases, counter to it.
Troll much? (Score:2)
Get the best of both worlds (Score:2)
Having a STEM degree and no communication skills is limiting. Having communication skills and no tech background is limiting in another dimension.
This is why my daughter, bless her crazy little cotton socks, has been doing a double major of Liberal Arts and Civil Engineering. She completed the arts degree this spring and will finish her B.Eng. next fall.
I like to tell college-bound people... (Score:2)
...double major in something useful and something useless.
I majored in math and computer science. I have a friend who went back to school in her 30s. Her majors are German and Philosophy. She's already getting translation work a year before graduation.
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I'm of the opinion that it isn't "something useful and something useless" ... it's more about "something directly practical" coupled with "something interesting and abstract to give you balance and perspective".
Not all things are 100% objective. And, likewise, in some things there's just no room for subjectivity.
Being able to tell the difference is something many people don't learn.
Only if you can show a historic interest (Score:2)
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
good use for BA (Score:2)
Expanded thinking (Score:3)
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).
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In other words, a team is successful if some of its members have communications ski
Srsly, don't cross the streams. It's bad. (Score:2)
Unless they are the same guy. Both answers are no.
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It's hard (Score:2)
Don't get a liberal arts degree (Score:2)
As someone who has a CS degree from a (respected!) liberal arts college, I can say that, career-wise, it was a mistake. One of the first things that came up in any interview I had during those first few years out of college was "Why did you get a BA instead of a BS?" which launched me into a whole discussion of the fact that I went to a liberal arts college where they only issue BAs....anyway, it was not a conversation that screamed "hire me!"
People love to ask for candidates with "critical thinking skills
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There are rare exceptions. In general a BA in a science means you took the 'baby' version of all classes. e.g. P chem without math or physics, calculus for business majors etc etc. Lots of hand waving and memorize and regurgitate. No understanding.
I won't hire a BA in a science for a technical position.
Doesn't matter (Score:2)
I've had this position in other comments, but I'll say it again - College degrees don't teach you how to do a job, and don't necessarily equate to job performance. To that end, it really doesn't matter what kind of degree someone has. A college degree is about broadening horizons, teaching critical thinking, and exploring subjects in slightly more depth in a controlled environment. I had taken plenty what we now call "STEM" courses in the process of pursuing a Harvard undergraduate degree (of which they
Yes, but not in Tech (Score:2)
There are any number of non-technical jobs for non-technical people. Market research, sales, maybe project management, etc. But in general you hire accountants to do accounting, lawyers for legal services, and techs for technical work.
Bottom line though, is that people who write columns for places like Fast Company and Dice have to write something, so they make stuff up.
No, but.. (Score:3)
Working in Tech - or DOING Tech? (Score:2)
For example: the liberal arts train students to thrive in subjectivity and ambiguity, a necessary skill in the tech world where few things are black and white I don't see that as being particularly helpful when trying to compile code - it either does or it doesn't. There is no alternative to having an ex
cafeteria Workers (Score:2)
tech CEOs want employees with liberal arts degrees
They must've interviewed CEOs of companies with their own employee cafeterias...
"Do you want fries with that?"
You may laugh... (Score:2)
Some of the best programmers I know have degrees in art and music, with even a few English Lit and Philosophy degrees scattered around. Then again, some of the best programmers I know never went or graduated from college. That's just on the IT/Programming side of things.
Hiring a real writer to handle press releases, web "verbiage" (um, the actual text on the website) would do wonders for quite a few sites (like.. /. hiring a real editor would be a boon...), documentation, etc. Once your company gets to a
Yes, absolutely!!! (Score:2)
The best programmers and other IT professionals that I've ever worked with had liberal arts backgrounds. In fact, a programmer named Paul Laughton who wrote the original Apple II DOS and the current RFO Basic app for Android has publicly stated that in his decades of experience, the best programmers he's worked with have almost always been musicians. Music notation is definitely a code, and the structure of music performance is very much like code writing--quite logical with leaps of creativity when neces
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Apple ][ DOS is hardly a qualification. That stunk to heaven, even for the day. He should never be allowed to code again.
Where liberal arts can come into play (Score:2)
1) UI design and usability - programmers are truly horrible at this.
2) Internationalization - It's hard to find people in the US with foreign language skills. Canadian doesn't count.
3) Project coordination with overseas clients or teams - see above and add in foreign cultures.
4) Requirements gathering and/or review - Which requires talking to people and, gasp, reading documents.
5) Business analysis - overlaps Requirements gathering and review
6) UI testing - much of which CANNOT be automated.
7) Project manag
Liberal arts degrees are not all equal (Score:2)
I design and implement automated testing systems, including specialized APIs and the VMWare-based virtualization environments designed to support them.
As part of getting a BA in psychology back in the day, you had to have several statistics courses, industrial psychology, human factors, ergonomics and it was strongly suggested that you become familiar with symbolic logic. Neurophysiology, particularly neuronal functioning, was popular too. Had psychology research funding not dried up after Reagan was electe
short answer (Score:2)
Unless you finagle your way into management.
Wait, now that I think about it, we might be thinking along legacy lines. Perhaps the future is more like: managers with liberal arts degrees presiding over completely outsourced technical resources.
Maybe I should go back to school and major in art history.
College is overblown (Score:2)
Can you learn to code without a tech degree? Sure! Can you learn to write wonderful essays without a liberal arts degree? Sure! Will a tech degree help you get into tech? Absolutely!
There are plenty of good coders who have gotten degrees in things like economics or even design. You can certainly teach yourself to be a great coder and put up a Github account that will impress potential employers. Granted, this is a struggle if you didn't study CS or an aligned field in school, but it's doable. Furthe
Plenty (Score:2)
Content writing, Knowledge Management, Software Localization, Software development phase one (design), BRD Management, Whitepaper creation, Game advisors (for historically accurate renditions of stuff, for example), etc.
Who do you think is writing all the lore in games?
Baloney (Score:2)
>> CEOs want employees with liberal arts degrees, because those graduates have critical thinking skills.
Liberal arts = critical thinking? lol thats funny....And people with CS, maths or hard science degrees are not naturally inclined to think as logically right?
What they ACTUALLY mean is they want more fuzzy-thinking compliant Yes-men, not engineers that actually know their shit and easily spot it when some middle-manager says something that makes no logical sense.
I have both (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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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.
Amen. As a Literature major I've long felt that my essay writing skills have helped me write easier to understand and better documented code.
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"is it really possible to express an idea in code that one cannot express in one's native language?"
Yes.
BA vs BS (Score:2)
I know of a few successful persons in IT that have a BA in computer science. There exists colleges out there that do not offer BS degrees, however they do offer a BA in Computer science. The primary difference is that the students are required to learn a second language rather than dissect a frog. As far as computer programming goes, I pose this question: Which might help a person more 1. understanding the nuances of how languages differ and learning key methods to memorize and differentiate those languages
Yay LA (Score:2)
If High School is sufficient for CS, then why not? (Score:2)
The question is interesting in relation to the current bias against four year degrees for software developers in some circles. If, as Peter Thiel claims, you don't need a degree, then it shouldn't matter what your degree is if you get one. So, from that perspective, a tech degree or a liberal arts degree shouldn't make a difference. If a liberal arts degree makes for a more intellectually well rounded person, then it could be argued that that's the better degree for tech.
Of course, I don't buy Peter's argum
My experience (Score:5, Interesting)
Liberal Arts Teach Rhetoric not Critical Thinking. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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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
If you're lucky (Score:3)
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.
Our Associate VP of IT (Score:3)
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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.
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