Why 'worthless' humanities degrees may set you up for life • Hacker News Board

Re: Why 'worthless' humanities degrees may set you up for life

#91

Post by repolfx » Sun, Apr 07, 2019, 7:43 PM UTC

chrisseaton wrote: post #5

I have friends from university with degrees in history, classics, theology, that make 3x what I do as a software engineer with a PhD. They work in things like corporate intelligence, risk analysis, planning and operations. Really high-powered serious stuff that makes what I do look rather trivial. They get hired as their companies want diversity of thought and the main job requirement is just being smart, switched-on…

I'm not sure there's a really great correlation between earnings and skill when it comes to jobs with titles such as those. You tend to find them a lot in financial firms and some of these industries have a lot of people who float straight from Oxbridge type universities into generic highly paid jobs because the firms don't know how to hire effectively. They just delegate to degrees. I've not been particularly impressed whenever I encountered most corporate planning or corporate intelligence type roles.

Re: Why 'worthless' humanities degrees may set you up for life

#92

Post by repolfx » Sun, Apr 07, 2019, 7:52 PM UTC

aitchnyu wrote: post #87

This is tangential, but what kind of education is sure to boost critical thinking, creativity and collaboration in their students? Is there a creativity path which pays off more than proficiency path?

There probably isn't one. Universities love to claim they teach critical thinking but this is a claim they can get away with only because most people don't have critical thinking skills: obvious followup questions may include "how" and "what's your definition of critical thinking".

One problem is that your three requests are somewhat at odds. Collaboration works against creativity and critical thinking in my experience because of pressure to conform to the group, or find ideas acceptable to the group. Being truly creative requires exploring ideas that might not pan out, or which are a bit off the beaten path. Group work also increases the cost of the work which can change the cost/benefit analysis.

When I look at my own life, arguing with people on the internet has been far better for my own critical thinking skills than the humanities lectures I attended at university were. The latter were entirely useless.

Re: Why 'worthless' humanities degrees may set you up for life

#93

Post by leetcrew » Sun, Apr 07, 2019, 10:00 PM UTC

throwaway284721 wrote: post #62

An honest article would say that a humanity degree signals that you're conformist and happy to tolerate boredem just as well as a STEM degree, and a STEM degree doesn't teach anything relevant either. This article says that with a humanity degree you can be just as smug as people with STEM degrees are.

I honestly feel sorry for people who have this opinion. I'm not implying that your analysis is wrong for the school you went to or even CS programs in general, but I feel that I learned a lot of relevant things in my undergraduate study and I'm sad that other people didn't have the same experience.

just a quick sampling of some stuff I did in my CS major:

* wrote a Pascal compiler from scratch

* implemented a variation of FAT32 in the linux kernel

* implemented a simple pipelined MIPS arch in vhdl

* benchmarked different versions of a parallel algorithm on a HPC cluster to see how it scaled on core count

* implemented lots of data structures in c++

some of that stuff applies directly to the work I do now. I landed a good c++ gig straight out of college, and I really appreciate all the tough c++ projects we had to do in school. amusingly the Pascal compiler also turned out to be relevant, as I now help maintain a compiler for a proprietary dialect of Pascal at work. the cpu arch, HPC, and linux stuff isn't directly applicable to my work, but the linux project was a good exposure to working in a large codebase.

not everything in a CS major is going to be directly applicable to your career, but a good program will give you strong foundations for any specialty you branch into later.

Re: Why 'worthless' humanities degrees may set you up for life

#94

Post by fwip » Mon, Apr 08, 2019, 3:07 AM UTC

0x445442 wrote: post #75

fwip wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Much of STEM is self-teachable. It is easy to self-evaluate "yes, I understand this math, and I get the right answers / produce working tools." It is not easy to learn the humanities without direct feedback from an expert, or robust experience with your peers.

Meh, the feedback you speak of is often subjective. The beauty of STEM is that you can objectively take stock of where you stand.

Exactly. It's easier to be good at something objective than subjective.

To be good at something subjective, you need help from others.

Re: Why 'worthless' humanities degrees may set you up for life

#95

Post by HNLurker2 » Tue, Apr 09, 2019, 8:07 AM UTC

This doesn't apply to Romanian education. Off topic: I also feel doubt to move from my highschool because it is no longer a Technical College but just normal highschool. Anyone has expertise in this?