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I have a philosophy degree, and I believe it’s a big part of why I’ve been successful in technology. It taught me to think in patterns and layers upon layers of
by exelius 8y ago
I have a philosophy degree, and I believe it’s a big part of why I’ve been successful in technology. It taught me to think in patterns and layers upon layers of abstraction; while giving me general-purpose tools that can be applied to problem solving in complex, interrelated systems.
I thought I was making a mistake choosing that degree path over CS; but CS was making me miserable with the crazy workload — which ended up being a bunch of busy work that got abstracted away by new languages / frameworks by the time we all graduated (we started in a world of esoteric mainframe architectures, C++ and perl and ended in a world of java, php and python so to be fair a LOT changed). But I don’t regret the philosophy degree at all.
- lordnacho 8y ago> but CS was making me miserable with the crazy workload Didn't you have to do a load of reading/essays in the philosophy course?
- trentmb 8y agoThis is more or less why I fell into mathematics. I eventually learned I have ADHD, which definitely explained why I couldn't keep up with the reading and writing workload in the philosophy and literature courses.
- exelius 8y agoYes; however many of the early philosophers are incredibly verbose in their arguments and you can learn a lot from a 2-page summary of a 50-page essay. Once you get to Nietzsche, the readings actually started to get interesting and I found myself wanting to read and discuss them.