The Pmarca Guide to Career Planning, Part 2: Skills and Education

I'm not entirely sure what the humanities requirements amount to at UCSD, but at Berkeley I do not believe that the minimum humanities requirements (typically fulfilled by intro courses) constituted a particularly strong dose of humanities, much as the math/science requirements don't constitute a particularly strong dose of math/science. In both cases, you can get away with not getting very in depth at all, and often students who are biased one way or the other are more likely to slack off in the classes they're not biased towards and/or forget them as soon as they're done with them. So there's simply no guarantee of well-roundedness either way.

The best thing, in my opinion, is to get at least a minor, with either the minor or the major being in a humanities or math/science/engineering field. If you just want to get a job doing software engineering or some such, you'll probably have to make the technical field your major, but a strong minor in comp sci can be far more formidable a programmer than many a CS major.

If I had things my way, I would actually insist on undergrads having to major in the humanities, as I'm too familiar with CS majors graduating with an impoverished understanding of society and culture and a lack of critical perspective, often precisely because they did not consider their humanities classes to be "real" classes. The more I learn, the more I'm amazed that what I've learned is somehow considered "optional" by the rest of the populace. Democracies are only as smart as their ruling majority, and as much of the realm of smart decision making in national and international affairs is dominated by social/cultural knowledge and perceptiveness as by technical knowledge, if not more. (Though to separate the two this way is admittedly artificial.) Much the same applies to businesses.

In an ideal world, every undergrad has to double major, one in humanities, the other in math/sci/engineering. And I'm not even sure that the ideal is so difficult to achieve or unreasonable to demand.

> a great way to end up wanting to kill yourself

This line is kinda interesting because the type-A personality he projects matches the profile of people who kill themselves when faced with a major setback.

I really cringe at his "change the world or you're a loser" pep talk bits. Chill out, man.

I think the life experience of guys like this makes their prognostications on the next 20 years useless. His formative career experiences happened during a historically unprecedented and continuous boom. Maybe I'm a paranoid nut, but severe and long lasting recessions and broken dreams are way more the norm than the last 20 years would indicate. The economy could blow up tomorrow and we could all be picking lettuce for the next eight years. Are you going to kill yourself over it?

Is it really worth uprooting from a region where you have deep ties for a career opportunity? Careers are ephemeral. Blood ties might keep you alive when the going gets rough.