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Anecdotally, yes. The best colleagues I've worked with in the tech industry have been people who quit their history or philosophy PhD programs. In most cases, I
by ForHackernews 1y ago
Anecdotally, yes. The best colleagues I've worked with in the tech industry have been people who quit their history or philosophy PhD programs. In most cases, I would hire classics majors who taught themselves to code over CS majors.
The fact of the matter is that most jobs in most industries do not require virtuoso technical ability, but they do benefit from close reading, attention to detail, a willingness to look at the bigger picture and challenge mistaken assumptions baked into bad specifications.
- manco 1y agoHow much of that has to do with humanities vs being self-taught?
- pklausler 1y ago+1 to this. Astronomy students also tend to be unexpectedly good at programming.
- terminalshort 1y agoThat just sounds like being smart. I can't see any relation to any of that to studying humanities in school. In fact from my experience in school the humanities classes were much more memorize and repeat back than the STEM ones.
- ForHackernews 1y agoThere's a correlation that smart people study things they find interesting. As soon as it became clear that computer science was a money maker, you had a lot of students taking doing CS majors who weren't really interested in anything except making money. Majoring in anything other than CS, engineering, finance, business, or biology (premed) is a signal for intellectual curiosity. Obviously there are plenty of students with real curiosity in those majors too, but there's also many incurious mercenaries.
- Jensson 1y agoBut that doesn't put any value on those degrees, just the smart people.
- abhiyerra 1y agoAs a history major turned engineer another thing I noticed is that while pure engineers tend to solve for x really well, people with humanities degrees tend to ask is what we are solving for useful? Definitely need both sides.