I have a philosophy degree, and I believe it’s a big part of why I’ve been successful in technology. It taught me to think in patterns and layers upon layers of abstraction; while giving me general-purpose tools that can be applied to problem solving in complex, interrelated systems.

I thought I was making a mistake choosing that degree path over CS; but CS was making me miserable with the crazy workload — which ended up being a bunch of busy work that got abstracted away by new languages / frameworks by the time we all graduated (we started in a world of esoteric mainframe architectures, C++ and perl and ended in a world of java, php and python so to be fair a LOT changed). But I don’t regret the philosophy degree at all.