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Comment by sushid | Hacker News Reader

Just curious, what are you doing now? What did you intent to major in/did you end up majoring in?

I'm a software engineer now. I majored in math. I've literally had recruiters tell me they couldn't offer me an interview because I didn't study "computers," including once at a college career fair. I wanted to tell that woman about the people who invented computers, but I held my tongue as she threw my résumé back at me.

Many of the people I have worked with had degrees in math. I'm not sure if more had CS degrees or math degrees, to be honest.

This is the problem when the gatekeepers (recruiters) are not your peers.

It's a shame that we've somehow structured our systems so that we clearly do candidates a disservice, even though we keep saying that attracting talent is of the utmost priority.

I work in a big beauraucric .gov. We had a guy who majored in robotics and was one of the best programmers hired in some time. (Iirc, he had some health challenges that made getting underpaid attractive)

He got demoted to some horrible computer operator position because an audit of HR revealed his degree, and the auditors found that robotics wasn't computer sciencey enough.

The union grieved it and he was eventually made whole a few years later.

God bless the union. Exactly the kind of thing they're for.

Better yet to fire HR.

I am surprised that you would not be well-served by a math degree from a half-decent institution, and very skeptical that your degree has not actually helped you obtain your career, versus not having any baccalaureate degree at all.

I've worked with software engineers senior to myself who had B.A.s or Ph.D.'s in math and no degrees with the letters C and S in them, including a few younger, fairly recent graduates.

I do have the magical letters "CS" in my degree, but I also have a second major in mathematics. While I must confess I hardly use a fraction of the math I studied on a daily basis and have forgotten most of it, it has served me well and there have been numerous times I would have been lost without it.

Pardon, but you seem a little bitter. I suspect you have no idea how good you have it, compared to say, most graduates with a degree in humanities from an expensive liberal arts college.

All that being said, if your intended career path is software engineering, I would tend to agree that studying software engineering is the best education to prepare for it.

> Pardon, but you seem a little bitter.

They seem extremely bitter with little justification, to be honest.

> I suspect you have no idea how good you have it, compared to say, most graduates with a degree in humanities from an expensive liberal arts college.

Poli Sci degree from an expensive liberal arts college checking in. Ask me how many sub-$40k/yr programming jobs I've taken because they're all I could get with a Poli Sci degree.

I have a degree in political science. Today I am the Director of Government Relations and I've been out of college for 10 years. Many of my friends from college are shocked that I am still in the career of my degree. Rather to the point, their shock that I made a career out of my degree. It's only a hypothesis, but I suspect that I was a little more desperate than some of my peers, and that allowed me to work for shit pay for many years as I clawed my way up the ladder.

Replying here because the above comment is too many levels deep: this shows exactly what is wrong with hiring. Especially the HR manager who is so used to getting 100 resumes and trying desperately to find a reason to throw out 80 of them. Some of the best people I ever worked with didn't have CS degrees, and it's sad that HR still works this way at so many places.

(We are working to change it in our niche of Sales, but even there we have these same battle stories).

OT/pro-tip: the trick to reply when the reply button is gone is to click the timestamp and reply on the item's page instead.

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