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0 pointsendtime17y ago0 comments

This is a more banal explanation, but majoring in something more useful than history might have helped. My sister is about to graduate with a BA in history and she can't find a job either.

Put another way, I study CS and I've never had a hard time finding work...and I don't owe it to mistrust of my elders.

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7 comments · 2 top-level

nostrademons17y ago· 4 in thread

When I was looking at schools, the advice I got was "Just get a degree. It doesn't matter what it's in - employers like liberal arts as much as technical fields because it shows that you know how to think. While if you get a degree in something specific like engineering, your job will probably end up outsourced to India."

Luckily, I happened to like computers anyway, and learned quite a bit of programming on my own. Plus, by sophomore year I'd basically figured out this was bullshit and employers really do care about concrete skills. But had I not been interested in programming as a hobby, things could've turned out very differently for me. I considered majoring in sociology, after all. ;-)

menloparkbum17y ago

"Just get a degree. It doesn't matter what it's in"

I wonder who has a better chance of getting a job at Google: a history major from Stanford or a CS major from , say, CSU Chico?

rms17y ago

I have a friend that works at Google Pittsburgh that was a CS major from the University of Pittsburgh. I think Google will interview people from state schools as like as they have a 3.75 GPA.

nostrademons17y ago

That's an interesting point. I suspect it depends a lot upon their concrete programming skills as demonstrated in the interview. It's funny how my first reaction - even as someone who always says "Your degree doesn't define you, and talent will find jobs no matter where you went to school" - was to assume that the Stanford history major is much smarter than the CSU Chico CS major, and just happened to pick the wrong major. But that's not necessarily true: maybe the guy from Chico is a Zawinski-class programming genius that happened to grow up in a family with no money and no college expectations. The point of the interview is to tease out circumstances like that so talented people from bad situations can rise to the top anyway.

It's also interesting because I know some Amherst history majors that I could never imagine getting a job at Google. But I also know an Amherst Asian Languages & Civ major who does work at Google, albeit in a non-technical position. Yet I don't know anyone at Google from a CSU: my friends here are from Rice/Brown/Brown/Amherst/Stanford/Berkeley/ Stanford/UChic/Cornell/Berkeley/Berkeley/ CMU/Duke/UCSD.

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endtimeOP17y ago

They both have poor chances, but I'd say the CS major has a better chance, unless the history major has taken enough CS classes to be able to be useful to Google.

silentbicycle17y ago· 1 in thread

Studying history gives you perspective. You don't need to major in it, but the heart of historical research consists of analyzing all the known evidence from a time/event and trying to logically argue a case for why things happened as they did, and/or finding the weaknesses in others' interpretations. It's not about memorizing dates.

The mainstream in computer science is incredibly ignorant of its own history, and burns a ton of energy reinventing the wheel every few years. (The old school Unix tools still work, for example, they're just fast as heck now because they were written to work on computes with about as much processing power as a bar of soap has these days.)

jibiki17y ago

I'd go so far as to say unix command line tools work much better than the window-based alternatives. Or at least I use them more as time goes on, and use nautilus less.

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