Can English Majors Be Good Developers?
bostinno.com
Can English Majors Be Good Developers?
1–10 of 51 posts
Re: Can English Majors Be Good Developers?
#2I have a BA in English literature. I'm not a developer, but hope to be eventually. Anyway, the question is ridiculous. One may as well ask, "Can programmers read a book and write a pithy criticism on it (grounded in some school of literary criticism)?"
Re: Can English Majors Be Good Developers?
#3Flawless grammar and the ability to reason about abstract things like linguistics, historical context and an author's intention are obviously easily transferable skills.
I would expect cult behavior from certain kinds of developers however.
Re: Can English Majors Be Good Developers?
#4If being a good developer was only related to technical skills and background, hiring would sure be a lot easier.
One of the best developers I know was an English major. He's even more amazing as a leader. He now leads a large team of engineers and I hope to someday get the chance to work with him again.
Re: Can English Majors Be Good Developers?
#5From personal experience, yes. (I am not, but I know a few). When they are good, they tend to be damn good.
There is a selection bias going on though. If you are a mediocre programmer with a CS degree, you can present yourself as a programmer with little delusion. However if you are, say, an English major programmer, chances are you won't advertise yourself as a programmer unless you really are the best sort of natural.
Skilled learned in an English program certainly may help, but all of the English major programmers that I know have always been programmers. They are naturals, have known it since at least early highschool, and picked their major despite that.
Re: Can English Majors Be Good Developers?
#6Most programmers gravitate towards programming because they is some aspect of programming that inherently interests them. I have about a dozen friends that I've tried to convince to learn how to program, even something as simple as Excel formulas, and they just weren't interested.
Most people won't find sitting in front of a computer day after day interesting. It takes a certain mindset to get comfortable writing and organizing things in your head an on a screen.
There is something to be said about the analogy to writing, however. When I code, I always feel like I'm trying to tell a story, and my goal is to make it easier for the next person who reads my code (likely me) to understand what I was trying to do. If it's too byzantine and "clever", and I have to sit there and think about what I was trying to do, then I'm doing something wrong.
Re: Can English Majors Be Good Developers?
#7"English majors" is a pretty wide-reaching group. You have really intelligent people who are passionate about deep analysis of literature, and you have people who just felt like majoring in liberal arts because they're lazy and "science is hard". Anecdotally, I have a good friend with a BA in English Lit who's now doing Rails dev at an early-stage startup (and doing a pretty bang-up job, from what I hear).
I'm willing to buy that, statistically speaking, more people who major in computer science or math will become good developers than people who major in the humanities, but that's fairly obvious: what you major in is a decent indicator of what you're interested in. Sure, not every English major who learns to code will become a rockstar ninja guru, but that's true of STEM students as well. Unless you can prove otherwise, there's no reason to believe that there's something inherent about majoring in English that inhibits the sort of analytic mindset that engineering requires.
Re: Can English Majors Be Good Developers?
#8I don't like these "so and so proven to be a great coder" type articles. Who cares what you have previously studied or worked with? Sure some skills can carry over, but with training any competent person can be a developer. We may not all be the equivalent of Vonnegut(well, English-studying folks), but then again not everyone needs to write an OS kernel for that matter. If you're a great developer there's a reason for that; you're intelligent and have a strong understanding. Understanding concepts can be learned over time, intelligence can't.
Re: Can English Majors Be Good Developers?
#9yes
Re: Can English Majors Be Good Developers?
#10"English majors" is a pretty wide-reaching group. You have really intelligent people who are passionate about deep analysis of literature, and you have people who just felt like majoring in liberal arts because they're lazy and "science is hard". Anecdotally, I have a good friend with a BA in English Lit who's now doing Rails dev at an early-stage startup (and doing a pretty bang-up job, from what I hear). I'm willin…
Exactly. The question is as absurd as "Can Biology Majors be good MotoGP pilots?"