Very few people I know actually have careers directly related to their undergrad majors.
I majored in Creative Writing and interdisciplinary (politics, philosophy, and economics) studies. Currently working as an applied AI researcher and about to go back to get my phd in AI as well. There are many paths to take. Often being different helps you stand out. Having a humanities and social science background is just as important and useful as a strong tech and quantitative background.
My first tech job, I was the only English major in the candidate pool. Turns out being able to communicate well and being articulate is also super useful.
"Currently working as an applied AI researcher and about to go back to get my phd in AI as well" : You're probably in the top 2% of intelligence, that's a huge advantage over most everyone else. People who are closer to the average may need to take more conventional paths to succeed.
There is no shortage of liberal arts majors who went to coding bootcamps and are now working as software developers, even if only a minority of them are in something as cutting-edge as AI research.
It definitely happens, but we shouldn't make it look easier than it is. I agree it's one of the fields where you don't need a formal education / diploma so in that sense the barrier to entry is indeed low.
While flattering that's not true in my case. It's fair to point out that my story is not conventional but I disagree that we assume that its intelligence or some other individualistic features that primarily determine success.
I went to a vocational school high school in a underprivileged community where college was not reality for most students( < 30% of student went to college). I dropped out of CS in undergrad because I lacked basic math skills most students have. My career path was IT analyst -> project manager -> data scientist -> applied AI. It took about ten years of self study, work, and some luck to get to where I am today. And I am nowhere near done learning and growing (hence going back for a phd at 32).
For many their paths will be non-linear especially if they come from underprivileged backgrounds. I had a colleague who went back to do his undergrad at 29 after work 10 years as line chef and found success in his mid thirties.
It's problematic that we conflate price for value and that the purpose of college is career training. Ideally college would be free or heavily subsidized like it is in many other countries.
A strong liberal arts training is valuable in producing a more educated populace. For me, coming from a small community, my biggest fear was being stuck working at my terrible high school. The main value of college for me was imagination. Being able to imagine myself not confined by my circumstance was far more impactful in my life than many of the marketable skills that I picked along the way.
I agree many people can study law / arts or even nothing at all and just do a bootcamp (or even just study at home without a bootcamp) and become a software engineer / data analyst / etc.
But the closer you are to the average, the harder it will probably get to successfully make those switches. Someone who is 30 and finished liberal arts has a big psychological hurdle that works against him when he'll try to switch occupations. Self doubt often creeps, sunk cost fallacy etc.
Now the closer you are to average in iq / will power / whatever it is that determines success in engineering, the harder making this switch gets, especially when you're not in your 20s anymore.
So to sum up my point is yes everything is possible in theory, but no - we are not created equal. We differ greatly by intelligence, background, emotional intelligence, our ability to change etc etc. The more closer you are to the average part of the curve the smarter you have to play the hand you were dealt.
> Very few people I know actually have careers directly related to their undergrad majors.I majored in Creative Writing and interdisciplinary (politics, philosophy, and economics) studies.
I strongly feel that path is only an affordable luxury if you come from a upper middle class background and up. Most people can't afford to experiment with higher education given its high monetary cost. You guys might not agree, but qzx_pierri has a point.
I'm conflicted in responding to this. What you described was not my experience. I come from an underprivileged background and was fortunate to escape my social location. Part of it was luck though which is not replicable.
But I agree that it is harder to take risks coming from a low-income background where the cost of bad choices is amplified. Risk taking is risky though. That's the tragedy, it's hard to escape your social location incrementally. But at the same time for each success story there are many that don't succeed whose stories we don't hear.
I usually tell students to double major (or minor) if they are privileged to go to college. We as a society have moved away from the idea of renaissance person who has experience in many disciplines towards hyper-specialization. It makes it hard to adapt when everything around you is bound to change.
> I usually tell students to double major (or minor) if they are privileged to go to college. We as a society have moved away from the idea of renaissance person who has experience in many disciplines towards hyper-specialization
We moved away from that because higher education has gotten exponentially more expensive. I'm sure there are some valid reasons for that (e.g. increasing graduate student TA pay?) as well as terrible ones (e.g. an increase in both administrative execs along with administrative exec pay), but that's what's directly hurting the motivation for experimentation. Only the well-to-do have that privilege now. For others, it's risk and not harmless experimentation.
> Majoring in "Eastern Gender Studies" will likely waste 4 years of your life.
I took a bunch of art history courses that focused mostly on Asia while double majoring in STEM fields.
I'm a scientist, not a designer, but I do manage a team that includes designers. I often have to weigh in on certain design choices, and getting those choices right is often make/break for the project. The tools and skills I developed in art history courses are super helpful. As a manager or either people or product, these "soft" fields that intersect with anthro start providing a lot of value.
A good friend double-majored in music and has a similar opinion.
So, I would not recommend majoring exclusivity in an obscure humanity. But attending university without taking some upper-division humanities courses is probable a mistake.
Oh, and ignoring intro-level humanities courses is an even bigger mistake. SWEs who are weak coders can often be mentored. SWEs who can't write or communicate well are pretty much a lost cause.
that's the argument for going to a liberal arts college and majoring a BA in CS instead of a BS.
It be an interesting study to look at universities that offer both tracks.
Take Columbia University that where one can earn a BSE in CS from the school of engineering, or one can earn a BA from columbia college. where the students are taking many of the same "core" CS classes, but the engineering students have a larger CS course load, while the BA students have a larger humanities course load.
I'm sure there are other universities that have similar setups where one can get similar degrees with different course load emphasis.
Comparing outcomes at places like Columbia would be fascinating.
Not sure I agree about liberal arts colleges writ large. The tippy-top tier are pretty great. But the ones in our region have... eclectic... CS faculty. Random math phds and early retirement from industry types. Entire departments taken together have single digit H-indices. I'm sure they're great teachers and all, but...
$25K+/yr for the same sort of de facto non-academic retired/shifted-from-industry instructors you can get at any coding bootcamp or community college is robbery. Especially when the state school next door is about the same price and has a real faculty still pushing the edges of the field.
While I agree regarding about the awfulness of SWEs who can't write or communicate (which is most of them), college credit hours are too valuable to be wasted on humanities courses, particularly when humanities topics are far more amenable to self-study than STEM topics.
> particularly when humanities topics are far more amenable to self-study than STEM topics.
Really? I feel exactly the opposite, especially for CS. How do you become a good writer without feedback from a good writer (or, at least, critical reader)?
> "How do you become a good writer without feedback from a good writer (or, at least, critical reader)?"
Software developers have to communicate with our co-workers and write documents continually anyway so it's not much additional effort to observe the clarity, effectiveness and persuasiveness of what one is writing or even solicit feedback. You also get to observe colleagues and leaders who are good (or not) at writing and learn from their output. Being a competent communicator becomes more or less a requirement as one rises through the ranks, for both managers and senior technical individual contributors, so it's best to make a virtue out of necessity and hone your writing skills in the workplace.
You’re assuming a baseline at or above those intro courses. I’ve had engineers who don’t know how paragraphs work, or whose vocabulary and reading comprehension seems to have stunted at middle school.
Those people are usually stuck as juniors without formal education because they’re not at the point where self-teaching is possible.
> "You’re assuming a baseline at or above those intro courses. I’ve had engineers who don’t know how paragraphs work, or whose vocabulary and reading comprehension seems to have stunted at middle school."
If they're that poorly educated, then they'll be floundering in college humanities courses too so I'm not sure how that's a counterargument. Spending credit-hours on remedial English courses is even worse value for money.
CS is an outlier. I imagine mathematics could be a good outlier as well. Its probably easier to find someone to help criticize your writing as opposed to getting your hands on expensive scientific / engineering equipment (both because of cost and regulations) however.
>[T]he content of the course is usually presented in whole or in part by the students themselves. Instead of using a textbook, the students are given a list of definitions and theorems which they are to prove and present in class, leading them through the subject material.
As someone with a STEM degree who enjoyed taking online classes at a CC during their 20s in Art History, I wouldn't call it a waste of time; it's brought me more joy, balance, and a feeling of well-roundedness than I had contributing to os projects.
I've always wondered - is there a way that we can decouple liberal education from technical skill building in the US university system? Because I absolutely agree that people crave and need the joy and balance that you describe, but currently its being held hostage to the price of at least 10k a year! Its so sad, I would kill for affordable, offline liberal education. The instructor doesn't even need to be elite (in fact I would prefer that she/he were not!), they just need to have a cool format.
True, I believe it does lead to a well rounded individual to study the arts and humanities, but with the cost of a college degree, the ROI on those courses ($900 per course) is not worth the investment.
applied STEM will pay off for the investment. I still take college courses online after my Masters in CS. I really enjoy learning about humanities and arts at a cheaper CC during my free time.
In all seriousness, I agree with you. However, I think some degrees are borderline "hobby-tier" - They're cool, but not very useful outside of personal enjoyment.
I see that STEM chauvinism is still alive and well on Hacker News.
Believe it or not, there are some skills you can pick up studying the humanities that will set you apart from your CS major peers. Being able to write and communicate clearly, for example, is pretty much a super power in most tech jobs.
The way I look at it now after working for large and small tech companies, the Stem degree will help you land your first job because you can be extremely green as long as you have that stem BS.
However a self taught programmer with a humanities degree can also get to the same position with some sweat equity.
Once at the position of software developer the person with the humanities degree takes off.
They've learned to write, they learned to talk and be communicative amongst friends and colleagues. Your job will let you learn as you go wrt to tech, but not as much with soft skills. where the stem grad is still that weird awkward guy who gets into arguments about pedantics, the humanities person is writing proposals and building a network.
The stem person needs to put in a lot more work on the soft skills they never learned, especially if they want to rise in the rankings, this is where the humanities person has that leg up
does getting a humanities degree improve one's soft skills, or do people that already have good soft skills choose and succeed in humanities degrees?
I took several upper-level humanities courses in college (almost enough to get a classics minor), but I don't really feel like they improved my ability to communicate/network in the office. in my experience, these courses teach the material and the skill of writing a very specific kind of formal research paper that doesn't have much to do with business or technical writing. while you don't directly use a lot of the concepts you learn in a CS degree, I find the technical background much more useful in my day-to-day work.
Sometimes I wonder why we have to choose. Why can't we take STEM degree and learn humanities from Coursera/Khan Academy. Or we take humanities degree and learn programming from Coursera/EdX/Youtube.
You don't have to choose; there is plenty of time during a four-year college education to do both. Plenty of people double major across STEM and humanities. Or if you don't want that level of commitment, you can create breadth with your electives.
You were a bit vague, but STEM has the highest concentration of job options that can pay you $60-70k straight out of college.
Well other than finance, but you could argue that STEM is heavily mixed into that field of study (and its derivatives) as well (mathematics, technology, data science)
Even in pure STEM jobs, like physics academia (where I work), writing/skill is probably the most important skill you need to develop to be a working, publishing scientist.
People always trot out this canard but you should look at how few actual degrees get awarded. cultural gender studies only produces about 15,000 degrees[1] compared to nearly 42,000 for Computer Science [2].
The problem here really isn't unmarketable degrees. It's low wage jobs that require college-educated workers.
Also - in my subjective opinion as someone who has been in the workforce for nearly 20 years: that Gender Studies student is going to be a better writer than the STEM major with a B.S. Too often they barely capable of professional writing. 90% of the good technical writing I see is done by less than 10% of the engineers. And the best writing I see is from the self-taught people who got a History major or something like that. Being able to produce a 100-level college paper is just table stakes.
Totally agree that liberal arts folks take an unfair beating -- the skills they develop are often more valuable than Computer Science skills, which are mostly unused. Very few of my colleagues have wielded any of the math or other skillsets that are core to Computer Science. Honestly, for 80% of developer or IT jobs, CS is just a hazing ritual to filter the weak.
I used to be the sponsor of an intern program and I'd say based on my experience is that, like anything else, ymmv with programs. One of the schools that I used to get folks from have a very good English, History, Caribbean Studies, and African Studies program, and the students are awesome. Some of the other programs have lower standards or are less mature, (or are landing zones for people who wash out of things) and the students suffer for it.
This happens for all things though. At my alma mater, the Business school was a recruiting funnel for big-5 accountants had a strict GPA requirement. So the frat boys and others would squeak out with an Economics degree. At another school, the Classics department was fossilized and core classes were solely graded on a bunch of multiple choice exams virtually unchanged for 30 years... you can imagine what type of student is attracted to that.
Are these even people solely majoring in gender studies? That seems to be the sort of degree that might work as a double-major with something more general and practical. Perhaps there may be even a handful of CS/gender studies double majors.
I have no idea what they study in this degree. But I assume it is based in part on philosophy/ethics, history and social sciences.
To me gender studies in particular seems to be an overly specific field to warrant such a high number (comparatively). I'm also very suspicious of its implementation (and I say that reluctantly as a feminist).
That said, I think there is huge value in philosophy/ethics but also in history and social sciences.
We need more smart, scientifically minded people studying these things globally and generating results, because we suffer from a severe lack of meaning and rational discourse.
To me it seems like half-baked ideology, fundamentalism, religion, cynical propaganda and tribalism are suppressing the advancement and refinement of our value systems and the resulting long-term goals of our societies.
While today's youth and intellectuals are squabbling over superficial things like gender pronouns, the powerful greedily disregard their responsibilities (at best) in the name of self interest. They're not only ignoring the consequences but actively try to discredit everything that gets in their way, even scientific fact, without repercussion!
People are still getting, murdered, mutilated and enslaved/oppressed and nature is starting to beat down hard on everyone, while the media and politics only further the divide and stir unrest by fighting over attention.
What value systems do we have today? Many base theirs still on provably toxic, incoherent and cynical ideologies like Marxism, Neo-Liberalism, Nationalism, Imperialism, Social Relativism, religion and so on. And in the middle we have a huge gaping "meh": An unreflective hodgepodge of tribalistic, after-the-fact values resulting in a pessimistic, regressive mindset: full of conservative nay-saying and hostile cancel-culture.
None of this is good enough and I feel like we are not advancing, but regressing. And none of this is solved by having more CS graduates who end up tuning the knobs on some ERP-system, analyzing customer data or building marketing websites.
If you think the crisis does not affect STEM degree holders, you are mistaken. There was a study commissioned by OPSE (Ontario Society of Professional Engineers). The findings directly contradict this oft-repeated wisdom that STEM degrees (or at least T and E in STEM) are a guarantee of a good life. If you have the time, I recommend that you read the full report. Here are some excerpts:
> only 29.7 per cent of employed individuals in Ontario with bachelor’s degrees or higher in engineering were working as engineers or engineering managers.
> A further 37 per cent worked in professional positions that normally require a university degree.
> Those who were not working as engineers and were working in positions that don’t necessarily require a degree made up fully 33.3 per cent of the total.
In other words, there are more people with engineering degrees who work in jobs not requiring any degree at all, than there are people working in engineering.
That's, I suppose, the view in "certain parts of the worlds".
In some other parts of the world, it is considered meaningful to learn a subject because one is passionate about it, and therefore is not a "waste of life".
Additionally, consider that some non-STEM degrees may produce trained thinkers (e.g. philosophy), which may turn to STEM careers in an indirect way; I've witnessed this on both sides - employees (careers) and employers (hiring).
Even only a subset of STEM is "useful" from what I've seen. Particularly in the science part there's just so few jobs and such high education requirements.
20 years ago was pretty viable but seems to be dwindling. I'm knowledgeable about finance majors so Ill use that as an example. The top 10% will do fine and make decisions while managing others money. The next 20ish percent will be salesman selling funds to others. The remainder will be writing business requirements so technology can automate their job
