Earlier quoted context omitted.
Similarly, all the CS grads from Berkeley have BA's with lots of general education breadth requirements (EECS students have BS's).
If I could afford to continue and get a 4 year CS degree, I'd prefer myself to get a BA, or get a CS degree at a non engineering school.
Have Liberal Arts Degree, Will Code
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Re: Have Liberal Arts Degree, Will Code
#22Edit: From the sounds of things, it's going to be very interesting:
Dan Melton, deputy chief technology officer at Granicus, a San Francisco-based startup that puts government data in the cloud, has hired two students with humanities backgrounds from App Academy. He said he looks for those students because they’re able to work better with other programmers and clients and understand the larger meaning of the work.
"We already have a lot of software whiz kids," Melton said. "We like to hire people who are interested in public affairs and civic engagement."
Sounds like it's going to be quite the culture change.
Re: Have Liberal Arts Degree, Will Code
#23The problem with this title is that in the reference, "Have Spacesuit, Will Travel", the character actually has something that's relevant to his travels.
Programming is writing.
Re: Have Liberal Arts Degree, Will Code
#24This is a real pet peeve of mine, but "Liberal Arts" is not synonymous with "Humanities": http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/liberal%20arts > College or university curriculum aimed at imparting general knowledge and developing general intellectual capacities, in contrast to a professional, vocational, or technical curriculum. ... In modern colleges and universities, the liberal arts include the study of litera…
To the article's point though, coding has become a much more important vocational skill than it was. I really do think there should be a fourth skill set in primary school education reading, writing, mathematics, and computer programming.
Re: Have Liberal Arts Degree, Will Code
#25Most 10-year-olds can't become ace web programmers (well, given an infinite time horizon, maybe they can, but then they aren't 10-year-olds anymore.)
For, largely completely different reasons, most liberal arts graduates probably can't either.
Of course, some can (I think I'm a pretty decent programmer, and my degree is a BA in Political Science. Then again, I was a programming long before I got that degree -- I might have even been a 10-year-old web programmer, if not necessarily an ace one, if the web existed when I was 10.)
Re: Have Liberal Arts Degree, Will Code
#26"Last March, he enrolled in App Academy, a 12-week web development program with locations in San Francisco and New York, and found a job coding within three weeks of interviewing. In his new position as a web application engineer at Yola, a San Francisco-based website building company, Morrison says he earns considerably more than what he had made doing administrative work."
Same thing was happening before the crash of 2000, people would take a month long course and then get jobs based on that course. I ask everyone what is driving up the valuations, and to look critically into the future. As soon as the companies that have the large valuations (Twitter,Facebook,etc.) start to post negative growth you will see an exodus.
Re: Have Liberal Arts Degree, Will Code
#27The problem with this title is that in the reference, "Have Spacesuit, Will Travel", the character actually has something that's relevant to his travels.
Surely the reference is to the saying "Have Gun, Will Travel" (to which "Have Spacesuit, Will Travel" was also a reference) which was popularly used to mean "I am prepared for anything", which is exactly the theoretical point behind a liberal arts degree (though not specifically a degree with a major in the humanities, though the latter are generally also the former, and the article seems to use them interchangeably; "liberal arts" is orthogonal to the major field of study.)
Re: Have Liberal Arts Degree, Will Code
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
Similarly, all the CS grads from Berkeley have BA's with lots of general education breadth requirements (EECS students have BS's).
If I could afford to continue and get a 4 year CS degree, I'd prefer myself to get a BA, or get a CS degree at a non engineering school.
Re: Have Liberal Arts Degree, Will Code
#29> If a 10-year-old can become an ace web programmer, why can’t a liberal arts graduate? Brain plasticity. Next.
And now that I am older (mid-20s) and my brain is supposedly less plastic, but I have motivation, context and determination in abundance, I feel like I am really learning and developing for the first time in my life.
Re: Have Liberal Arts Degree, Will Code
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
Programming is writing.
Despite the flurry of Stunk&White analogies, I actually found the two activities to be quite distinct. I think in part because language is much more general (you could say "lose") and because programming exhibit concepts that are nowhere to be found in language (even at the "language" level, programming idioms have little to do with actual idioms).