Have Liberal Arts Degree, Will Code | Hacker News Reader

Have Liberal Arts Degree, Will Code

blogs.wsj.com

23 pointsjseliger58 comments

> If a 10-year-old can become an ace web programmer, why can’t a liberal arts graduate?

Most 10-year-olds can't become ace web programmers (well, given an infinite time horizon, maybe they can, but then they aren't 10-year-olds anymore.)

For, largely completely different reasons, most liberal arts graduates probably can't either.

Of course, some can (I think I'm a pretty decent programmer, and my degree is a BA in Political Science. Then again, I was a programming long before I got that degree -- I might have even been a 10-year-old web programmer, if not necessarily an ace one, if the web existed when I was 10.)

I think I'm a pretty decent programmer, and my degree is a BA in Political Science. Then again, I was a programming long before I got that degree

I have a BA in English, but I've been programming since I was 7, starting with BASIC, then on my TI-82 in junior high, C in high school, Perl, PHP and Javascript in college. I work full time as a software engineer now, and I make a good living doing it.

On the same token, you could build cars your whole life... get a liberal arts degree... then say all LA's can easily become mechanics.

After all, what's easy for you is easy for everyone right?

They can and do. By the droves. Great engineers come not only from liberal arts but from a variety of disciplines. The best engineers I've worked with did not have CS or CE degrees and neither do I. Some of them had nothing but a high school diploma or GED. Formal training is certainly not needed, and in many cases, it's a hamper. Also, the money wasted on such is much better spent elsewhere, especially considering the curriculum and many colleges/universities, one that is hardly up to date and does not prepare students for real world development.

The biggest issue with the article is

"Last March, he enrolled in App Academy, a 12-week web development program with locations in San Francisco and New York, and found a job coding within three weeks of interviewing. In his new position as a web application engineer at Yola, a San Francisco-based website building company, Morrison says he earns considerably more than what he had made doing administrative work."

Same thing was happening before the crash of 2000, people would take a month long course and then get jobs based on that course. I ask everyone what is driving up the valuations, and to look critically into the future. As soon as the companies that have the large valuations (Twitter,Facebook,etc.) start to post negative growth you will see an exodus.

I did this. My undergraduate degrees are in the humanities. I started programming in my late twenties. I also have kids. For anyone in the same spot -- it's not impossible, you'll just have to consistently put in hours to learn, and be open to criticism when you make the inevitable mistakes. That's probably true for most career paths.

A more accurate title would be "Studied Humanities, Will Code". I have a liberal arts degree from Middlebury College where I studied Computer Science, so it shouldn't be too surprising that I will code (and do code full-time professionally).

Similarly, all the CS grads from Berkeley have BA's with lots of general education breadth requirements (EECS students have BS's).

If I could afford to continue and get a 4 year CS degree, I'd prefer myself to get a BA, or get a CS degree at a non engineering school.

Right I think that in a lot of ways it's actually an advantage to do CS at a Liberal Arts school. The key point to this article seems to be that you can always learn to code regardless of what you've learned in the past.

At most LACs, you can't get a BS degree. With that being side, my experience with liberal arts CS education (at Wesleyan) is ironically that it was too much CS because "liberal arts is suppose to be self-enrichment and theory". We went into a lot of theory and math (e.g., functional language, language design, automata, algorithm proof of correctness) and even the "practicum" courses was fairly academic (information theory analysis on genomic data, cryptography) and not "web development" or "J2EE".

That goes back to the perpetual debate between applied and theory classes. I'm not sure if it has to do with LACs vs research universities or whatnot.

I received my CS and MS in CompSci from a liberal arts school. For me it was a great route to take.

OT, but 7 weeks at the Middlebury Summer Languages program let me go from zero French to placing into third year French when I returned to my... um, "full-time" college the following fall. (After fighting them because they initially insisted I couldn't have progressed beyond a second year placement.)

Abilities and performance varied significantly, but the program let you make rapid progress if you were of a mind to.

If I may ask (in part because I consider returning to that area of Vermont), how did you find the Computer Sciences program?

This is a real pet peeve of mine, but "Liberal Arts" is not synonymous with "Humanities": http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/liberal%20arts

> College or university curriculum aimed at imparting general knowledge and developing general intellectual capacities, in contrast to a professional, vocational, or technical curriculum. ... In modern colleges and universities, the liberal arts include the study of literature, languages, philosophy, history, mathematics, and science.

Computer science (as distinct from "programming" or "software engineering") is a liberal art! As are pure mathematics, and natural sciences like physics, chemistry, or biology.

> Computer science (as distinct from "programming" or "software engineering") is a liberal art!

Arguably, but a BS in Computer Science isn't a Liberal Arts degree, its a science degree that is named that to distinguish it from a Liberal Arts degree (BA, the "Arts" refers to Liberal Arts.)

Of course, if you have a BA in Computer Science, that is a Liberal Arts degree.

I would argue that in most cases, the BA/BS distinction is a meaningless artifact of what credential your university happens to offer.

For example, MIT only awards BS degrees to undergrads, so you could major in French Studies or history and get a BS: http://mitadmissions.org/discover/majors

In contrast, a school like Amherst only awards BA degrees, so you'd wind up with a BA in physics, chem or computer science: https://www.amherst.edu/academiclife/departments

I think in most cases BA vs. BS is meaningful -- schools that offer only BS degrees have different kinds of core programs than schools that offer only BA degrees, and there are plenty of schools that offer both kinds of degrees, sometimes in the same major field of study.

I guess if a single school offers both degrees in the same field, with different requirements, that would be a meaningful distinction.

However, in my experience, it will still be a distinction without a difference, since very few employers would understand or care about it.

> However, in my experience, it will still be a distinction without a difference, since very few employers would understand or care about it.

This presumes that the only meaningful effect of a college education is a vocational certification that is presented to employers.

If we assume the primary goal of a college education is developing the ability to think abstractly and reason meaningfully about the subject at hand, then the BA/BS distinction becomes even less consequential.

If we presume the BA student has taken a few more electives in outside areas, and the BS student has taken a few more major-focus classes and perhaps more quantitative classes, it's hard for me to see that choice having a serious impact on a student's intellectual development.

At most, it's a signal about the type of person that student was when they choose their degree.

> If we assume the primary goal of a college education is developing the ability to think abstractly and reason meaningfully about the subject at hand, then the BA/BS distinction becomes even less consequential.

What if we assume that the primary goal of a liberal arts undergraduate degree (BA) is that, and the primary goal of other types of undergraduate degrees (BS, BFA, BSL, etc.) differs for each?

My alma mater, the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada, gave the choice of three degrees: a BA (CS), a BSc (CS), and a Bachelor of Computing.

These days isn't BS more or less shorthand for "took calculus and a real lab science" these days?

> These days isn't BS more or less shorthand for "took calculus and a real lab science" these days?

When I last saw a catalog from a school that offered both degrees in the same field, the BS generally required more units in the major field of study and closely related fields and substantially less required "breadth" classes in fields outside of the same major.

Many BA programs I've seen in non-science fields require at least one laboratory science course in their breadth requirements (calculus probably isn't a requirement.)

This is true, and as a potential undergrad my leaning was to an "engineering" school, but all three of my daughters ended up at "Small Liberal Arts Colleges", one with a Physics degree, one with a Biology degree, and the third will probably end up with a creative writing/economics degree. So two of them at least, very much 'hard' science and all very employable.

To the article's point though, coding has become a much more important vocational skill than it was. I really do think there should be a fourth skill set in primary school education reading, writing, mathematics, and computer programming.

Upvoting in simultaneous disgust and enlightenment.

Do we really have 10-year-old "ace web programmers" running around?

Not 10 year old ace web programmers, but I have a friend who started coding PHP at age 10 and was doing serious freelance work (making as much as any other seasoned PHP dev) in high school.

Definitely not the same, but getting started at 10 and being proficient at 14 isn't unheard of.

All I know is that you'll never miss them. They always like to point out how young they are when sharing anything.

Hum majors who take up coding are more than welcome to try,but they should be warned: programming is hard. It's easier than multivariable calculus, but there there ARE right and wrong answers, and you WILL come a point when you'll hit a wall and be frustrated, and you need to have the perseverance to get through those points. If this is to be your career you need to commit to a virtual lifetime of learning and growing.

Also, start with Python. I know some of you think it's neat to jump right in with JavaScript and make cool animations and dynamic web pages, but -- I'm from the future. You should start with Python.

I cam from History to IT. I can agree with this and still struggle with it at times.

Well, really, the only difference between people like me, who have been doing this for most of our natural lives, and people like you is that we've run into a bunch more walls and now act like it's no big d. But the initial frustration as a n00b can be killer.

> If a 10-year-old can become an ace web programmer, why can’t a liberal arts graduate?

Brain plasticity. Next.

I've never found these "brain plasticity" arguments very compelling. I had no motivation or context for learning when I was young (0-20) and while I might have done well in school tests and read a lot of books, I don't think I really absorbed anything in any depth, or thought in any particularly interesting or challenging ways - I certainly never achieved anything which would have required so much willpower and focus as learning to program modern computers.

And now that I am older (mid-20s) and my brain is supposedly less plastic, but I have motivation, context and determination in abundance, I feel like I am really learning and developing for the first time in my life.

The fact that it is possible for a motivated 25-year-old to be better at learning something than the same person as an unmotivated 10-year-old does not refute the fact that human brain development is such that certain forms of learning are much easier at 10 than at 25.

Neuroplasticity primarily relates to the evolved ability of young children to rapidly, effortlessly acquire basic, evolutionarily critical behaviours - language systems and other core social behaviour necessary for tight social integration (and later various more complex but still critical secondary social behaviours) in a small hunter gatherer pack essentially - all picked up subconsciously from the social environment.

The important difference is that all of this acquisition is a result of tens of thousands of years of consistent natural selection. It's hard-wired because humans have needed these things, and children have needed them as fast as possible, for a long long time.

The things humans attempt to learn in modern times however (non-native languages, formal systems of logic, the ability to argue and reason in complex fashions, the ability to program complex systems) are completely evolutionarily unprecedented, and the result is clear: children are not able to acquire these behaviours effortlessly. They don't just rub off. Instead they (generally) require focussed, extensive supervision and tuition from humans that have already put in the hard work of mastering them.

So the relevance of neuroplasticity still seems small to me.

> The things humans attempt to learn in modern times however (non-native languages, formal systems of logic, the ability to argue and reason in complex fashions, the ability to program complex systems) are completely evolutionarily unprecedented, and the result is clear: children are not able to acquire these behaviours effortlessly.

At least in the case of non-native languages, while it may not be "effortless", every study I've seen has indicated that it is much easier for children to learn them.

I find the alternate methods people use to become programmers fascinating (alternate as in "didn't graduate with a CS degree from a 4 year school when 21). I did something different than this article suggested-I used the Post 9/11 GI Bill to take almost every single CS course at my local community college.

Sounds like you made good use of the GI Bill. But were the classes necessary in helping you land the first programming gig?

I think so. I went to a rather large community college, and was able to get a wide diversity of coursework. Having all that exposure certainly helped, as well as a lot of programming on my own-having a repository of (what are now rather embarrassing to look at!) code samples I worked on in my spare time also helped. Having a paper credential (in this case an AA) also helps a lot.

I wrote a short essay on my experience with transitioning from the humanities to web design and development. In short, I think it can be done... and that there are even certain advantages and unique skills that a liberal arts degree provides... but ultimately it comes down to some innate skills combined with lots of hard work. Here is my full essay for anyone interested: https://medium.com/this-happened-to-me/d609c1770dd4

Went with a BA in politics since young arrogant me got tired of the CS curriculum (why do I need to learn java? I can already make anything in PHP!) and politics was more interesting (and better demographics honestly).

So I've brushed up on my CS via online courses and enjoy a more educated/enlightened apathy toward modern politics.

> Friedman says she doesn’t regret majoring in English. She says her communication skills help her explain work to less technical colleagues.

I wouldn't really agree with that, but whatever you need to justify your student debts.

You wouldn't really agree with what? That her English degree helps her communicate better, or that English degrees in general help people communicate better?

Oh, wait. You don't have an English degree, do you?

Clearly spoken by someone who has no idea about communication at all.

As an additional data point, I was into systems/programming as a kid and so when I went to college I studied English hoping it would make me a more rounded person.

I currently do sysops professionally.

The problem with this title is that in the reference, "Have Spacesuit, Will Travel", the character actually has something that's relevant to his travels.

Maybe they're trying to allude that the liberal arts degree isn't completely worthless?

Programming is writing.

Programming is to writing what building a machine from basic electronic components to electrically stimulate vocal cords is to speech.

Despite the flurry of Stunk&White analogies, I actually found the two activities to be quite distinct. I think in part because language is much more general (you could say "lose") and because programming exhibit concepts that are nowhere to be found in language (even at the "language" level, programming idioms have little to do with actual idioms).

Good developers also tend to have good communication skills (such as writing). There isn't a 1-to-1 mapping, but things like Strunk&White can give a lot of insight applicable to developers. One example is Strunk&White's idea of a style guide, a concept that all multi-developer software projects should implement to some degree.

I have a BA in CS from a liberal arts school and I completely agree. Nothing in math or computer science is "discovered," but we're just learning and then writing a long narrative documenting the beauty and truth of the Universe. (Some people just have a stick up their a$$ because they happen to have done time to please someone else in either ivory tower or other powers, to think that what they do is better than shoveling snow).

I think that's the joke.

"Have X, Will Y" pre-dates that novel

http://www.word-detective.com/2013/07/have-gun-will-travel/

> The problem with this title is that in the reference, "Have Spacesuit, Will Travel", the character actually has something that's relevant to his travels.

Surely the reference is to the saying "Have Gun, Will Travel" (to which "Have Spacesuit, Will Travel" was also a reference) which was popularly used to mean "I am prepared for anything", which is exactly the theoretical point behind a liberal arts degree (though not specifically a degree with a major in the humanities, though the latter are generally also the former, and the article seems to use them interchangeably; "liberal arts" is orthogonal to the major field of study.)

I'm interested to see, as better systems for teaching coding develop, popularity and awareness of its accessibility builds, it begins to go mainstream, and the marketplace becomes more competitive and wages decline, is, will the oldguard agitate for economic protection?

Edit: From the sounds of things, it's going to be very interesting:

Dan Melton, deputy chief technology officer at Granicus, a San Francisco-based startup that puts government data in the cloud, has hired two students with humanities backgrounds from App Academy. He said he looks for those students because they’re able to work better with other programmers and clients and understand the larger meaning of the work.

"We already have a lot of software whiz kids," Melton said. "We like to hire people who are interested in public affairs and civic engagement."

Sounds like it's going to be quite the culture change.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com