Not exactly about books, but another type of writing.
From The Wall Street Journal:
As the demand for quality computer programmers and engineers increases, conventional wisdom assumes we need more students with computer-science and engineering degrees. Makes sense, right?
I’ve been preaching this exact message for the past 10 years as I’ve fought to recruit the best programmers. Recently, though, I’ve realized that my experience has proved something completely different.
Looking back at the tech teams that I’ve built at my companies, it’s evident that individuals with liberal arts degrees are by far the sharpest, best-performing software developers and technology leaders. Often these modern techies have degrees in philosophy, history, and music – even political science, which was my degree.
How can this be?
It’s very simple. A well-rounded liberal arts degree establishes a foundation of critical thinking. Critical thinkers can accomplish anything. Critical thinkers can master French, Ruby on Rails, Python or whatever future language comes their way. A critical thinker is a self-learning machine that is not constrained by memorizing commands or syntax.
Writing code can be just as stimulating as playing guitar or learning chess. Therefore, like musicians, many of the best programmers are self-taught. They don’t write their first line of code in a classroom. Instead, they learn Ruby on a laptop while at Starbucks, just for fun. Most liberal arts degrees encourage a well-rounded curriculum that can give students exposure to programming alongside the humanities. Philosophy, literature, art, history and language give students a thorough understanding of how people document the human experience. Technology is a part of our human experience, not a replacement to it.
Link to the rest at The Wall Street Journal
It’s always programmers. Yet another article about how any yahoo can code. If it were so easy, Starbucks should be crying over the shortage of baristas.
Take any group of ten professional programmers. Two are really good and keep the application going. The rest vary from mediocre to horrific. I suspect the artsies would fit somewhere in that range, or would be hired as “analysts” to do thinking and generate reams of documents.
As spoken by a dinosaur, COBOL, CICS, DB2 mainframe programmer.
There are probably some courses you could find, but a mainline CS curriculum has little or nothing to do with, you know, writing code. You get lots of compiler design, set theory, statistics, and that sort of thing, but the general thrust isn’t writing code to solve problems, it’s making the tools to write code with.
It’s sort of like getting a degree in “Writing Novels” that consists almost entirely of linguistic analysis and information theory. Which is nice, but if your goal is “learning how to write something I will get paid for”, not all that useful.
Credentials aren’t a substitute for competence.
I agree with your point: coding is a craft that is best learned by doing. However, understanding set theory, statistics, compiler design, electrical engineering, and a number of other subjects that go into a typical software degree are also critical to good software design.
Those subjects are not as easy to learn on the job, although many people do learn them that way, but their learning tends to be a bit spotty. One of the things I liked about software is that no one really cares how you get your knowledge, it’s what you can do that counts, at least in my experience.
The challenge to coding is that it changes rapidly. New languages, tools, and techniques pop up overnight, so that your capacity to absorb new ways of working is as important as your skill at what you already know.
Most of the coding I did in college was done in languages that I never used on the job: Pascal, Ada, Fortran, COBOL. I spent most of my career coding and reviewing C, C++, and Java with a smattering of Perl, shell scripting, Python, Javascript and Ruby thrown in for color. I expect all of those will be as dead as Pascal and Ada when today’s CS graduates reach their stride in the industry.
I suspect that the non-coding subjects of a CS degree today will serve the quantum coders of the next decade better than any class in Java. And a background in reading the Greek classics in Greek might be just the thing for getting down on qubits.
To further complicate matters, my salary went up most rapidly when I quit even looking at code, reduced the number of engineers reporting to me, and began to concentrated on improving existing product architectures and dreaming up new ones.
Also, my experience was that when the layoffs come, they always do, the MBAs go first.
But what do I know? I’m retired! And happy to be writing instead.
Oh, if only.
There isn’t, to my knowledge, a single English department anywhere in the world that includes information theory in its curriculum, even as an elective farmed out to the maths department. (I have specifically tried looking for one.) They don’t even know that there is such a branch of knowledge.
Academe does not talk to academe, and the less rigorous the subject matter, the snootier its practitioners are about outsiders who might have something to teach them. When I was majoring in linguistics, the field was rife with tortuous faction-fights about how communication occurred, what ‘meaning’ meant, and whether, in fact, there were any such things at all. Meanwhile, four floors up in the Philosophy department, there was a wall chart explaining in beautiful and logical detail the exact, long-proven answers to all the questions that the Linguistics department considered unanswerable.
The best programmer I ever knew had a degree in theology. The second best was a navy locksmith. The third best was a Carnegie-Mellon software engineer. The fourth had no degrees whatsoever but was a Mormon bishop (or something– I don’t know exactly). The fifth had an MFA in creative writing. The only common strain I see is strength of character.
Out of curiosity: what type of business/product were they coding for?
Big business, small business, contract work…
What type of QA? Usability testing?
Mostly integrated service and network management COTS products for the Fortune 1000, government, the military. We also tried our hand at products for SMBs, but never with great success. Not much contract work, but my habitual pattern was to work closely with single customers to develop a product, then sell to a wider market. I’ve written two books on cloud computing and one on personal cybersecurity. Along with products, we also developed automated QA regression, stress testing tools, a few of which were eventually commercialized, but not by us.
I should add that the vast majority of engineers on my teams were BSCSs (Bachelor of Science in Computer Science) with a sprinkling of MAs and PhDs. I found it interesting that the really exceptional coders had exceptional backgrounds. That could be a tautology: exceptional people are exceptional.
They’re all similar professions, in that they’re about abstracting information and applying it hierarchically.
The overlap between “lawyer” and “programmer” is fairly broad as well. I had to take a class for a legal credential recently; all the excepts, precludeds, wherefores, thences, and the like fell neatly into Backus-Naur format in my notes…
Techies couldn’t possibly care less about “liberal arts” vs techies, because techies are techies by nature.
Whether it be scientists, engineers, or mathematicians, we do what we do because that is what we are and it doesn’t matter if society values what we do or not. Mostly it does, but only *just* enough that we can make a decent living at it.
On the day job when the subject of money or acclaim comes up, we all chorus together: “If you wanted to be rich or famous, you shouldn’t have gone into engineering.” None regrets it. Might as well regret breathing.
(Or writers stop writing. Inner demons rule.)
Now, if others feel the need to puff up their professional self-esteem, have at it. But if you want to know how the balance of supply and demand really stands, here is a clue:
https://federalsoup.com/articles/2018/06/07/opm-looking-for-stem-workers.aspx?s=FD_190718&m=1
I worked 24 years in State Government and they never let me code. They sent me to many classes to learn the latest language, then never let me code. They always paid huge sums to some external company to do any coding. I was usually the Engineer in charge of the Contractor, signing off on their work.
The memo will not result in any useful hires. It is a means of being able to show that they can’t hire people so that they can justify continuing those Deep State contracts.
Read the Laundry series by Charles Stross. It is all too close to how Government treats and contains programmers. I love the series, but it does hit too close to home. HA!
Then of course, there is the movie Snowden by Oliver Stone if you want to be truly depressed. Glug!
That’s pretty much what the comments to the linked piece are about.
Techies are valued…just not enough to pay them market value. Certainly not in government circles. Especially because most government jobs can’t go to non-citizens so brain-drain isn’t an option to fill the need.
Not for coders, which is but a tiny fraction of the shortfall.
Certainly not for scientists or engineers, where repurposing staff from other disciplines is not even an option.
That’s because (at least in America) programmers are “workers.” In almost all organzations, the highest-paid worker must make less money than the lowest-paid manager. That puts an upper limit on how much they can make, even though they’re usually salaried employees.
Same thing with engineers.
Sure, there are occasional progrmmers and engineers who break through the red ceiling, but though their title may include part of their old job name, their jobs are almost entirely management; they’re no longer making money, they’ve become part of the corporate overhead.
I have known a great many technicians and engineers in my time, and I have never heard of any of them being forced to accept less than a market wage (in the private sector) because some random manager was being paid less.
The liberal arts are important. Which is why it’s a pity universities went out of their way to devalue them.
It wasn’t universities that devalued them. It was people who did that. Most coming from the liberal arts side.
Right now I am vibrating with how right the article is, and I can’t express how important this is on so many levels.
I’m in the process of watching all three seasons on the TV series The Magicians. I’m going to watch the whole series three times, then read the novels that they are based on.
Watch the trailer and realize that the story is what the article is talking about.
THE MAGICIANS Season 01 NYCC TRAILER (2015) New SyFy Series
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wCMMNUAYoNE
Years ago, Bruce Sterling wrote of the time when Engineers would be discarded and Liberal Arts majors would rule, because the tools made it possible to solve problems rather than having to building things from first principles as it was in my day.
– The Beautiful and the Sublime
In the Long Ago and Far Away, I was an Engineering major. I don’t understand or speak Liberal Arts. I can’t write the novels about these characters because I don’t speak the language of Liberal Arts. Sure, I could go back to school and get a Masters in Liberal Arts, but I could never dive in and live in that highly educated, pretentious world to capture that zeitgeist. The language, the style, the intensity of seeing the world as metaphor rather than the literal thinking of “Nerds”.
Here in Santa Fe, The College of Santa Fe went out of business in the last crash because Business discounted the value of a Liberal Arts training. You have Starbucks filled with people who have Masters Degrees in Liberal Arts because they can’t get a job in Liberal Arts. Put them to work learning to code and you change the industry. No more maladjusted males living on pizza, Jolt Cola, and hating women. i.e., Gamergate.
Look at the TV series The Big Bang Theory and see how limited “Nerd” thinking is — without Penny humanizing them they would fail as human beings — and visualize a world where Liberal Arts majors come into their own once again.
Your last two paragraphs — or are they Bruce’s? Can’t tell — remind me that liberal arts types flocked to the greatest evils of the 20th century. They often believed they should rule the world, not those icky nerds et al. Some humility is called for here.
I like well-rounded people, but I don’t think “specialists” are defective in some fashion. I like hot showers and vaccines and the internet, and I don’t care if the people making that happen aren’t people I would want to hang out with.
The nerd may build a machine that makes my life easier. A liberal arts person may design the interface of that device so that it’s intuitive. I don’t see the point of devaluing the former person to elevate the latter — yes, that’s a common human flaw, but I still hold it in contempt.
It’s not the “Nerd” that did any of those things. If you look into the history of each they were multifaceted people and created because they were not specialists. Music, Arts, languages, passions drove those creators.
And remember the article, there are far more Liberal Arts majors than there are people in STEM — most of them working for minimum wage. The economy will do far better if you can recruit them into coding. Give them a purpose in life by making them valuable to the economy. That way they can move out of their parent’s house.
If you need coders now, a Liberal Arts major can get up to speed far faster than any STEM program can produce.
The other point I was trying to make, is that I do not have the skillset to write about Liberal Arts characters for Story, and do not know how to build that skillset. TV shows like The Magicians make me hungry to write stories like that, yet I can’t write them.
The economy will do far better if you can recruit them into coding.
You must know a completely different set than the ones I do. I had trouble enough getting reporters to figure out how Outlook works.
“I can’t remember if I sent him the email.”
“Did you look in your Send folder? Arrange it by date or recipient?”
Yes, I believe a subset of LA majors could pick up coding, and do it. But the whole of them? Nah. If you want to help unemployed LA majors, end credentialism and cut down red tape so that it’s not necessary to rack up thousands in pointless debt. Shoot, that’d help everybody!
But some professions are geared to certain mindsets. I’m reminded of a letter to an advice columnist from a self-proclaimed humanities major who was upset that her boss didn’t just tell her the answers to her coding questions. He was attempting to get her to look up the answers and learn to debug her codes herself. That’s how it’s done, hence the existence of stackoverflow and codepen, but she thought he was just being a jerk.
However, coding is an activity where you have to get used to trial and error, and learning to spot your own errors. The programmers in the comments made that abundantly clear. Several copy editors aptly explained why the boss had the correct approach, as did several teachers. Those editors and teachers could likely learn to code, because they at least have a mindset that would allow them to handle the self-teaching/debugging part.
But — sometimes I amuse myself by inspecting elements of different websites, like seeing what font is being used on the page. Or I’m trying figure out how a cool feature was executed. Even if you got an English major to code, I’d question the value of doing so if they would find it excruciatingly dull to spend their spare time the way I spend mine.
As for how to write certain characters … well, sometimes you just have to get out more 😉 Other times, you just accept there are some people’s heads you just can’t get into.
You must know a completely different set than the ones I do.
HA! Yes. I’m thinking in terms of people like Robert Langdon from The Da Vinci Code who know multiple languages and “symbology”, i.e., semiotics, or people that learn the various Romance Languages and can read Beowulf in the original Old English, or Art History, or Music History and know what things like Baroque Art and Baroque Music means, or people who memorize and dissect Shakespeare plays for fun, along with quoting Ovid at the drop of a hat and expecting you to know the translation.
You know, people that actually learned something that is far more complex than any modern programing language. Those kind of people.
In other words, Liberal Arts. English is a tiny subset of that. Don’t get me wrong. English is a powerful tool, I just wish more people actually understood it.
I’ve been watching The Magicians and the way some of the characters speak is rubbing off on me. How interesting. I’m beginning to get the pretension, and not in the Structural Engineering way I learned so long ago.
BTW, I didn’t start to discover stuff like Liberal Arts until my 50s. I remember going in to Borders and asking about a book on Heraclitus, and the little girl who was helping me instantly corrected the way I said the name. I knew I was asking the right person. That was when The College of Santa Fe still existed, and the students worked at Borders to pay the bills, or waited tables in the local restaurants. I miss those days. They had a beautiful library. I worked with the Engineer who designed the spiral staircase. He was in Italy under Mussolini. But I digress.
So, in other words, a small subset of liberal arts majors.
So, in other words, a small subset of liberal arts majors. Being one myself, I can tell you that far too many of my fellows do not have the self-discipline or self-motivation to learn coding.
Yes. My husband is a physicist who dropped science for software, (and now process improvement both of which pay better), but in his experience out in the wilds, once he left science, he was the best coder around, because of the scientific training. Rigor and error handling. Getting things wrong, figuring out why, fixing it.
He’s better rounded than liberal arts majors, and I bet a lot of science-trained people are, because there’s no barrier to entry in Liberal Arts as there is to STEM.
According to 2016 figures from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2.7 percent of hourly wage workers in the U.S. make the federal minimum wage or less. If ‘most’ liberal arts majors make minimum wage, they have been atrociously ripped off by the universities and need to look for jobs in the other 97.3 percent. But that is mathematically impossible in any case, because a hell of a lot more than 2.7 percent of the work force have liberal arts degrees.
Perhaps that’s too much math for you to follow.
If that’s what you think STEM majors are like in real life, you need to actually meet some. Your bigotry is no excuse for your ignorance, and vice versa.
‘The Big Bang Theory’ is not a documentary. It is fiction, and very unrealistic fiction at that. There are people whose intellectual life is on the level of the so-called geeks on that show. They do not have Ph.Ds. Many of them are high-school dropouts. But it is possible for the writers of that show (liberal arts majors one and all) to write bad jokes about geek culture, and it is not possible for them to write realistic stories about people who have more breadth and depth of knowledge and intelligence than they have been trained to understand or imagine.
Meet some real people and lose the offensive stereotypes.
I’d say most good programmers start before they are old enough to begin any college program.
If you’re old enough, just about all of us were amateur coders with a liberal arts background. You were smart, they hired you, and you figured it out.
I lament the days of teams of amateur coders — it was so much more fun when everyone was learning what to do at the same time. We had grand discussions about controlled vocabulary and knowledge domains and self-referencing code and operating system structures and performance metrics, and not a one of us was a legitimate STEM type.
You couldn’t even get useful CompSci classes at serious universities — they didn’t exist.
Creativity is creativity, it comes in many forms and real creativity can’t be forced – nor can it be taught – it can be sharpened/formed but there has to be something there to work with (and far too many schools crush rather than help build it …)
Well-rounded. Exactly. I tried to stuff that into the brains of my daughters all through their youth. (Still hound them, today.)
Apply intense concentration on areas of great interest, but remember to learn everything else, too.
“Specialization is for insects.” – Heinlein
Dan