General question -- what should the career-oriented student who is not obsessed with CS and programming consider studying instead of or in addition to CS?
You are in the middle of a large body of water. Swim towards any island that looks close. Make sure you get to an island before choosing a different one to swim to. You'll find that becoming a stronger swimmer was the main benefit of the journey.
Personally, after 10 years in the industry, I'm convinced that psychology is going to be extremely important in the coming years. (But maybe this is a budding middle-manager in me talking.)
If you like cars, study automotive design and go work there. Ditto anything really.
Domain knowledge is a real differentiator.
You need both technical AND "liberal arts" skills as interdisciplinary study is a fundamental part of CS (and a major reason the field even became a thing - look at the work Turing, Simons, etc did).
Tbf I did a double major in CS and Government years ago so I have my biases.
At least at the school I went to, CS was kind of a joke for undergrad.
The students that cared about CPU design, low level software (firmware, drivers, kernel, embedded), or robotics (including computer vision, etc) all went computer engineering.
The students that cared about cryptography or the formal maths side of computing all went to the mathematics dept in their applied discrete maths or applied computational mathematics degree paths.
The students that cared primarily about high performance computing or applied computing in general (but didn't go one of the aforementioned routes) went through the computational modelling and data analytics program.
And the students that wanted to learn CS for the purpose of game design or creative arts had their own program within the school of arts (can't remember the name).
So out of the students who were interested in computing that went to my uni for undergrad, the ones that were left in the CS department were those who were told "get a CS degree for lots of money", those that didn't bother researching any other programs, and those who wanted to be web devs or enterprise java/c# devs.
But otherwise, trades. It is a serious path to money and ultimately starting your own business.
Now I’m trying to leverage my previous 13 years of experience in aviation, but yeah, I’m not super optimistic. I applied at a robotics company attempting to automate an airplane that I flew professionally and they didn’t want me for a safety position where I would literally be working on how to use the robot.
I’m legit thinking I’ll just do my own thing if I can’t figure out something.
I have a BA in philosophy and a MS in CS w/ a focus in computer vision. Similar boat as you. No 13 years of exp in a prior industry though.
I stopped trying to get a job a few months ago and have been plugging away at my own projects. I’ve been (equity compensated) working for a startup for the last month or so in a non-technical role and it’s been really eye opening as to what it takes to get something off the ground. I have a lot of interest in pursuing that route now and if you do too it could be good to connect.
But I was responding to the claim that a bachelor's in math can get you "any kind of job." That just isn't true. You will always have to compete with the people who have specialized and have experience in that particular domain. Why would any organization hire a math student for a software development job (for example) when they have hundreds of applicants lined up with CS degrees/internships/whathaveyou? Pick any other domain and apply the same thought process. Again, you'd really have to be pulling on your connections or be a standout in some other sense to get that level of consideration. I'm confident that for a lot of hiring managers, success in the long term and "hiring the best" are secondary to "can this person be productive in a reasonable amount of time?".
I remember when I was in school philosophy students used to say the same thing and I thought it was totally absurd. That somehow a philosophy student is on equal footing with someone who just spent four years coding? Just insanity.
Though n = 1, I have a CS degree and am not particularly smart, and... that explains a lot about my life and career trajectory post-grad.