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Not a startup here. But my formal qualification is a bachelor of economics, and a bachelor of arts with majors in philosophy/religious studies. I started doin

Not a startup here. But my formal qualification is a bachelor of economics, and a bachelor of arts with majors in philosophy/religious studies. I started doing computer science, but changed courses after first year because, frankly, I found it WAY too boring. I was getting pretty good grades too, but couldn't see myself sitting through two more years to do the kind of programming work they were trying to impose upon us (basically preparing us for faceless industry production jobs in my opinion, this was around 2000 or so, don't know if its changed since then) :P That's not the most common mix, so i've probably just de-anonymised myself :P At the time of writing this I'm employed by the government to write algorithms, do analytics and produce numbers. I guess I'm pretty much a data scientist. I wrote this: https://communities.sas.com/docs/DOC-2462 https://communities.sas.com/docs/DOC-2462 in my spare time, and now i'm working on a similar/analytics project written in Common Lisp. I can't really speak for the philosophy degree itself, but I definitely prefer working with other people who are philosophically inclined. People with a wide array of interests and questioning, skeptical minds. I've found you'll hear a lot of things from the tech community which are taken on face value, which could be said for most areas of life. Personally, there's a whole bunch of marketing material and propaganda out there in machine learning, stats, big-data and AI circles at the moment on what things actually do or can actually do, and I feel having already been involved with some of the philosophy of such fields helps me separate the wheat from the chaff because I've already considered the nature of knowledge, what we can know, and what we can find out. But on the other hand it can be somewhat frustrating, because there's another personality type that appears a lot in compsci/numbers/engineering who most certainly does not want to deal with theory/ambiguity, and indeed they were attracted to the field in part because they thought they wouldn't have to deal with such ambiguities. That and I find myself analyzing/taking apart whatever system I'm in, and i quickly become uncomfortable with it, which means moving around jobs/projects alot. But that might just be a general intelligence/hacker thing, and not specifically a philosophy thing. Well, that was rambly...

ACow_Adonis 13y ago
Oh, and the downside is of course that you don't have a CS degree, so you have to get past the barrier with some people who equate degrees with particular knowledge. Some people just can't seem to get their heads around the notion of people knowing things without them...
andkon 13y ago
Oh man, this resonates. I think in any organization you need a certain balance of those two personalities - but the philosophy degree sure makes the questioning/skeptical folks more my type. And until I started my own company, I moved around a lot too. But now that I'm leading things that sort of incisive thinking is a boon (sometimes). When you say you get uncomfortable with a system, though, d'you mean ethically? Or just bored?
- ACow_Adonis 13y ago
  Honestly, in my own experience, which I'm loathe to use as advice for anyone else, I've had experiences that fall into both. Bored-wise i'll enter a job, get acquainted with a practice, and almost immediately see failings/things to improve/things I can automate. Then I will. It'll be great, and then I'll have sorted the problems that exist within the context of my little environment over which I have control, and everything will be going 2-3 times better, but then i become bored again... In the best case scenarios, if there's not scope for any new challenges/problems in the job/company, I tend to move on amicably at that point. However, there's been a few points where I've clashed "ethically". And this probably does have to do with philosophy, because its quite clear I've thought quite deeply about how I think I should live my life, and the minimum values I expect those around me to hold, and other's can be quite surprised/offended/awkward when you don't just go along with it all. I won't work with certain employers/jobs/industries (probably not what people are thinking, I'm not religious). So far this hasn't hindered me in terms of putting food on the table and living a comfortable life, but i accept it could one day, and I don't know what i'll do if I ever were to fall upon particularly hard times. But I try to live simply compared to most anyway :P Generally I try to do the right thing, then I'll leave if i can't. Its only really happened once so far, and the jobs I find obviously objectionable i've never applied for/accepted in the first place. I've taken some risks here and there which other people probably wouldn't have in that regard... Now, being a general philosophical person, I do wonder about the ethics of what I do, and god, looking back i've probably got some reflections and thoughts about that one...but I can sleep comfortably at night and don't really have any regrets yet :) I'm trying to work towards going it alone (or at least in charge) myself eventually....
  - 13y ago

ACow_Adonis 13y ago

Oh, and the downside is of course that you don't have a CS degree, so you have to get past the barrier with some people who equate degrees with particular knowledge. Some people just can't seem to get their heads around the notion of people knowing things without them...

andkon 13y ago

Oh man, this resonates. I think in any organization you need a certain balance of those two personalities - but the philosophy degree sure makes the questioning/skeptical folks more my type. And until I started my own company, I moved around a lot too. But now that I'm leading things that sort of incisive thinking is a boon (sometimes). When you say you get uncomfortable with a system, though, d'you mean ethically? Or just bored?

ACow_Adonis 13y ago
Honestly, in my own experience, which I'm loathe to use as advice for anyone else, I've had experiences that fall into both. Bored-wise i'll enter a job, get acquainted with a practice, and almost immediately see failings/things to improve/things I can automate. Then I will. It'll be great, and then I'll have sorted the problems that exist within the context of my little environment over which I have control, and everything will be going 2-3 times better, but then i become bored again... In the best case scenarios, if there's not scope for any new challenges/problems in the job/company, I tend to move on amicably at that point. However, there's been a few points where I've clashed "ethically". And this probably does have to do with philosophy, because its quite clear I've thought quite deeply about how I think I should live my life, and the minimum values I expect those around me to hold, and other's can be quite surprised/offended/awkward when you don't just go along with it all. I won't work with certain employers/jobs/industries (probably not what people are thinking, I'm not religious). So far this hasn't hindered me in terms of putting food on the table and living a comfortable life, but i accept it could one day, and I don't know what i'll do if I ever were to fall upon particularly hard times. But I try to live simply compared to most anyway :P Generally I try to do the right thing, then I'll leave if i can't. Its only really happened once so far, and the jobs I find obviously objectionable i've never applied for/accepted in the first place. I've taken some risks here and there which other people probably wouldn't have in that regard... Now, being a general philosophical person, I do wonder about the ethics of what I do, and god, looking back i've probably got some reflections and thoughts about that one...but I can sleep comfortably at night and don't really have any regrets yet :) I'm trying to work towards going it alone (or at least in charge) myself eventually....
- 13y ago