The Pmarca Guide to Career Planning, Part 2: Skills and Education | Hacker News Reader

The Pmarca Guide to Career Planning, Part 2: Skills and Education

blog.pmarca.com

36 pointssamb22 comments

This reads like it was written by an HR representative at Google. I'm all for hard sciences and engineering but the most financially successful people I've met, been friends with, or worked for all have much different backgrounds than what he is describing.

He makes some other weird points. Economics and mathematics on their own are almost as useless as renaissance literature. (I know, I studied mathematics and economics)

"that's a great way to end up wanting to kill yourself when you hit 30 and you realize you still haven't done anything with your life."

I think he's a bit off base, here. This statement describes most of the 30 something engineers I've met who didn't work at the right startup and therefore didn't become rich. In contrast most liberal artsy people (do artists count, or does "liberal arts" mean people who majored in something like sociology?) seem reasonably content.

It might help if you read his "part 0". Won't necessarily make you agree with his points, but he provides a bit of context:

http://blog.pmarca.com/2007/09/the-pmarca-guid.html

That's an interesting point. But... I'm someone who came from an arts degree and sort of turned myself into a reasonable facsimile of an engineer. I personally regret not having done things the other way round.

The problem with arts degrees is that very few people end up doing what they originally wanted to do. Most of the journalism grads are going to end up in PR, or something even less related to what they supposedly studied.

So yeah, one might be more content if one had the talent and passion and stuck with the dream. But so many people don't and that's a ticket to a midlife crisis.

I think that Marc may have missed something here - he derides the humanities without recognizing that the humanities are a huge part of a typical math/science/engineering curriculum. So while Marc thinks he's comparing "technical" students to "liberal arts" students, he's actually comparing well rounded students (who have studied both science and liberal arts) to narrowly focused students (who have only studied liberal arts).

I double majored in math and literature, but if I'd only done the minimum humanities coursework for math, I still would have been forced to do a ton of humanities. At my college (at UCSD), all students had to study:

2 years of world history and cultures 1 year of a foreign language 1 year of upper division history. literature, or other humanities course 1 year of fine arts or performance arts 2 courses in math, which can be fulfilled with symbolic logic in the philosophy dept and easy statistics (without calculus) through the psychology department. 2 courses in science, which can be fulfilled with "physics for poets" type courses (again, no calculus)

This is regardless of major. So an english major can get through college without ever really studying math or science in a meaningful way, whereas a math student who does the absolute bare minimum is still going to come away with a substantial amount of humanities coursework.

I think it's time to abolish the term "broad liberal arts education". If it's only liberal arts, and doesn't include math and science, it isn't broad. And I think this is what really separates the math/sci/eng students from the humanities majors. An english who took a ton of math not reflected in his/her degree would be just as well prepared - however, these people are very rare.

I'm not entirely sure what the humanities requirements amount to at UCSD, but at Berkeley I do not believe that the minimum humanities requirements (typically fulfilled by intro courses) constituted a particularly strong dose of humanities, much as the math/science requirements don't constitute a particularly strong dose of math/science. In both cases, you can get away with not getting very in depth at all, and often students who are biased one way or the other are more likely to slack off in the classes they're not biased towards and/or forget them as soon as they're done with them. So there's simply no guarantee of well-roundedness either way.

The best thing, in my opinion, is to get at least a minor, with either the minor or the major being in a humanities or math/science/engineering field. If you just want to get a job doing software engineering or some such, you'll probably have to make the technical field your major, but a strong minor in comp sci can be far more formidable a programmer than many a CS major.

If I had things my way, I would actually insist on undergrads having to major in the humanities, as I'm too familiar with CS majors graduating with an impoverished understanding of society and culture and a lack of critical perspective, often precisely because they did not consider their humanities classes to be "real" classes. The more I learn, the more I'm amazed that what I've learned is somehow considered "optional" by the rest of the populace. Democracies are only as smart as their ruling majority, and as much of the realm of smart decision making in national and international affairs is dominated by social/cultural knowledge and perceptiveness as by technical knowledge, if not more. (Though to separate the two this way is admittedly artificial.) Much the same applies to businesses.

In an ideal world, every undergrad has to double major, one in humanities, the other in math/sci/engineering. And I'm not even sure that the ideal is so difficult to achieve or unreasonable to demand.

> However, most of the people who have a huge impact on the world, outside of pure research and education, do not have PhD's. Draw from that whatever conclusion you think makes sense.

My conclusion is that Marc is being a bit sloppy here. Like 75% of the Y Combinator partners, I have a Ph.D.---and I think graduate (and, indeed, undergraduate) degrees are overrated. But given the small percentage of Ph.D.s even among technical people, it would be very surprising if most people having a high impact had them. More relevant is to ask whether Ph.D.s have relatively more impact than those without doctoral degrees. I don't know the answer, but I think it's a more interesting question.

I think this is software-centric thinking.

If you look at hardware, you really need a Ph.D. to make a serious contribution to theory, and a lot of important founders (Intel springs to mind) had doctorates.

[Off Topic]: mnemonicsloth, please put your email address or some contact info in your news.yc profile, if you don't mind. Or shoot me an email.

Marc is telling it like it is, even if it is a little difficult to hear.

A Ph.D. is a huge opportunity cost with an extraordinarily high risk/reward ratio. I have often had undergraduates ask me if they should pursue a Ph.D. I first ask them if it is their desire to teach at a research university. This desire is a little like becoming an NBA player especially in certain technical fields like physics. A horde of Ph.D. candidates is good for tenured Professors and research universities, but not necessarily for the students. Post-doc hell is left as an excercise for the reader.

If they don't have a burning desire to be a professor or happen to dislike trees, I don't really see the point of a Ph.D. I tell them to at least take a hard look at the costs of their decision either way: real financial, opportunity, time, etc. An objective tally will rarely be in favor of a Ph.D.

I share Marc's (and your) skepticism about the value of a Ph.D., which is part of why I said that graduate degrees are overrated. I also counsel undergraduates to consider the large opportunity costs of graduate school. But I was taking issue with the sloppiness of the statement "most of the people who have a huge impact on the world . . . do not have PhD's", which would seem to be true whether or not having a Ph.D. is particularly valuable. It's sort of like saying "most of the people who have a huge impact on the world are not left-handed". Well, yes, but that's true even if you replace "the world" with "baseball", and yet lefties have proportionally more impact in baseball despite still being a minority. The question is, can the same be said of Ph.D.s (in the world, I mean, not in baseball)?

> Graduating with a technical degree is like heading out into the real world armed with an assault rifle instead of a dull knife. Don't miss that opportunity because of some fuzzy romanticized view of liberal arts broadening your horizons -- that's a great way to end up wanting to kill yourself when you hit 30 and you realize you still haven't done anything with your life.

Jesus, what a prick.

Unfortunately, he's right.

This isn't so much because engineering is great, or the only way to make your mark on the world. The problem is that today's arts faculties just suck. It's possible to graduate knowing things that only matter within the walls of the university, and you may not realize this until the very last minute.

That said, it's possible to graduate from engineering schools and not have a clue about history, current events, different sorts of people, what matters in life, and the fact that one cannot wear socks with sandals. You may not be starving, and you may be in a sense contributing to society more than many artists, but you may never have really stretched your own mind -- merely let your geek tendencies do their thing.

I think the best possible thing to do in university is to take the hard science courses, and then supplement them with intense and challenging arts courses. The ones where you have to do learn some serious art history, or do some sort of performance. This is the best of both worlds.

One recommendation I have (in spite of PG's essay) is that if you take a course in Classics or "Western Humanities" as it was called at my college, take it from a Philosophy professor.

I might have just been lucky, but they always had the most interesting discussion and criticism of the stuff we were reading. One of the best discussions about the scientific method I've ever had came from in a Humanities class taught by a philosophy prof. One of the first things we read was Galileo's letters on sunspots. Later in the semester we demonstrated how Freud's theories were completely unscientific (because they were unfalsifiable/untestable). I actually never really understood the difference between axioms and theorems until I took that class. I mean, I knew vaguely that an axiom was a rule and a theorem was a confirmed hypothesis, but the fact that axioms are essentially arbitrary never really sunk in. In actual science classes I was always too busy learning details to think about the abstract stuff.

The problem with this entire line of thinking is that sure having an assault rifle is great but it doesn't do much good if you don't have any context to know where to point it.

Think of a technical skill or degree as the lens through which you focus a broader education.

The broader education allows you do apply technical solutions to non-technical problems and may even help you come up with that "big idea".

Look at PG, he seems to be doing pretty well on both accounts (undergrad liberal arts degree, grad technical degree).

I liked the first one, but I must say I'm a little disappointed that there is an assumption that college is a needed experience. Granted, it is in most cases, but - especially for entrepreneurs - it's not always the only way to success.

I think the assumption is that, without a degree, you will not be able to find equivalent experience from which you can draw out the same "how to think like an engineer" perspective.

Who would suggest skipping college? Yet, if you have a clearly great opportunity lined up, it's not a bad thing to leave. And if you get yourself kicked out midterm like I did, you have great motivation to make something happen in the non-college world. When I was at college, there were many stories of guys who flunked out and ended up doing interesting things. Then I became one!

I think I have the "how to think like an engineer" mentality already, two and and a half years in. Does this mean I can quit now?

I know you're kind of joking here, but the answer appears to be "yes", you probably could get away with quitting school. It's not like law or medicine where you're useless without the actual degree. Dropping out of whatever degree program you're in seems to be a time honored way to the top in the high tech world (gates, jobs, ellison, allen, dell...)

But do you really want to take that risk? Nobody gets to the top without finishing something. Maybe part of "thinking like an engineer" involves wrapping it all up.

That was my reasoning for finishing college, and in hindsight was probably the right choice. Remember that Gates, Allen, Jobs, and Dell had all started and run profitable businesses in high school (traffic counters, payroll software, blue boxes, and stamps, respectively). If you have that kind of background, you really don't need college. If you don't, you might want to build it up before attempting a startup.

For what it's worth, very few of the very succesfull people I know have an engineering degree. Many have an MBA or JD, though.

Many of the successful people I know do have an engineering degree. Of the first four I can think of, there are two engineers, one MBA, and one MD.

> a great way to end up wanting to kill yourself

This line is kinda interesting because the type-A personality he projects matches the profile of people who kill themselves when faced with a major setback.

I really cringe at his "change the world or you're a loser" pep talk bits. Chill out, man.

I think the life experience of guys like this makes their prognostications on the next 20 years useless. His formative career experiences happened during a historically unprecedented and continuous boom. Maybe I'm a paranoid nut, but severe and long lasting recessions and broken dreams are way more the norm than the last 20 years would indicate. The economy could blow up tomorrow and we could all be picking lettuce for the next eight years. Are you going to kill yourself over it?

Is it really worth uprooting from a region where you have deep ties for a career opportunity? Careers are ephemeral. Blood ties might keep you alive when the going gets rough.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com