Comment by roxolotl

> Now as a hiring manager I’ll say I regularly find that those who’ve had humanities experience are way more capable and the hard parts of analysis and understanding.

The humanities, especially the classic texts, cover human interaction and communication in a very compact form. My favorite sources are the Bible, Cicero, and Machiavelli. For example Machiavelli says if you do bad things to people do them at once, while good things you should spread out over time. This is common sense. Once you catch the flavor of his thinking it's pretty easy to work other situations out for yourself, in the same why that good engineering classes teach you how to decompose and solve technical problems.

The #1 problem in almost all workplaces is communication related. In almost all jobs I've had in 25-30 years, finding out what needs to be done and what is broken -- is much harder than actually doing it.

We have these sprint planning meetings and the like where we throw estimates on the time some task will take but the reality is for most tasks it's maybe a couple dozen lines of actual code. The rest is all what I'd call "social engineering" and figuring out what actually needs to be done, and testing.

Meanwhile upper management is running around freaking out because they can't find enough talent with X years of Y [language/framework] experience, imagining that this is the wizard power they need.

The hardest problem at most shops is getting business domain knowledge, not technical knowledge. Or at least creating a pipeline between the people with the business knowledge and the technical knowledge that functions.

Anyways, yes I have 3/4 a PHIL major and it actually has served me well. My only regret is not finishing it. But once I started making tech industry cash it was basically impossible for me to return to school. I've met a few other people over the years like me, who dropped out in the 90s .com boom and then never went back.

This is also why I went into the Philosophy major - knowing how to learn and how to understand is incredibly valuable.

Unfortunately in my experience, many, many people do not see it that way. It's very common for folks to think of philosophy as "not useful / not practical".

Many people hear the word "philosophy" and mentally picture "two dudes on a couch recording a silly podcast", and not "investigative knowledge and in-depth context-sensitive learning, applied to a non-trivial problem".

It came up constantly in my early career, trying to explain to folks, "no, I actually can produce good working software and am reasonably good at it, please don't hyper-focus on the philosophy major, I promise I won't quote Scanlon to you all day."

Many top STEM schools have substantial humanities requirements, so I think they agree with you.

At Caltech they require a total of at least 99 units in humanities or social sciences. 1 Caltech unit is 1 hour of work a week for each week of the term, and a typical class is 9 units consisting of 3 hours of classwork a week and 6 hours of homework and preparation.

That basically means that for 11 of the 12 terms that you are there for a bachelor's degree, you need to be taking a humanities or social sciences class. They require at least 4 of those to be in humanities (English, history, history and philosophy of science, humanities, music, philosophy, and visual culture), and at least 3 to be in social sciences (anthropology, business economics and management, economics, law, political science, psychology, and social science).

At MIT they have similar, but more complicated, requirements. They require humanities, art, and social sciences, and they require that you pick at least one subject in one of those and take more than one course in it.

I worked for someone who I believe was undergrad philosophy and then got a masters in CS.

On a related note, the most accomplished people I've met didn't have degrees in the fields where they excelled and won awards. They were all philosophy majors.

Teaching people to think is perhaps the world's most under-rated skill.

I would say you have some bias.

yes, sometimes you need people who can grasp the tech and talk to managers. They might be intermediaries.

But don't ignore the nerdy guys who have been living deeply in a tech ecosystem all their lives. The ones who don't dabble in everything. (the wozniaks)