Comment by apdinin | Hacker News Reader

Comment by apdinin | Hacker News Reader

This article wrongly implies that people getting English PhDs are only doing so in order to become tenure-track English professors. But I just completed my PhD in English two weeks ago, and I'm also the TECH co-founder of a VC-backed startup. Many of my peers are not just tech savvy, they're also developers, designers, and entrepreneurs. They just also happen to be interested in studying slightly older forms of technology -- literary technologies.

Yes... books and poems and epics and dramas are all technologies, too.

I should hope the HN community isn't fooled by the _New Yorker_ article's professional typecasting. After all, Paul Graham has an entire book called _Hackers and Painters_, and he argues: "Of all the different types of people I've known, hackers and painters are among the most alike. What hackers and painters have in common is that they're both makers. Along with composers, architects, and writers, what hackers and painters are trying to do is make good things." (http://www.paulgraham.com/hp.html).

"Hacking" -- as both Paul Graham and much of my dissertation argues -- isn't a purely scientific discipline. It's also a humanist and aesthetic pursuit.

If you don't believe me, go pick up a collection of Emily Dickinson poems (you know... the things you probably haven't looked at since you were in 9th grade). You might be surprised to discover all of the conditional logic, the programatic loops, and the object oriented structures.

This article wrongly implies that people getting English PhDs are only doing so in order to become tenure-track English professors. But I just completed my PhD in English two weeks ago, and I'm also the TECH co-founder of a VC-backed startup. Many of my peers are not just tech savvy, they're also developers, designers, and entrepreneurs. They just also happen to be interested in studying slightly older forms of technology -- literary technologies.

Impressive. However, judging from the available empirical evidence from recent professional surveys [1], you and your like-minded peers are indeed the exception, not the rule: over the last 35 years, a consistent 90-95% of newly-minted English PhDs sought academic faculty positions; with only 5-10% seeking careers outside academia [Fig. 2]. There is a reason why the so-called 'alt-ac' career track is called that way in the broader MLA community.

[1] http://mlaresearch.commons.mla.org/2014/02/26/our-phd-employ...

This is an important point, I think. It's not that English PhD's aren't hireable, it's that they drink the kool-aid where the only possible route is a tenure-track job in their field. On the other hand, some of my best mathematics and computer science teachers (with PhD's, not at a research university) have started in English.

I think it's really a culture problem. PhD students aren't encouraged to think about their career early on. My PhD advisor (mathematics) is very insistent that I know all of my options, and as such I have a huge list running of potential employers and avenues to seek furthering my career. I have a list of the "tricks" I need to try to get various kinds of postdocs, I go to both theoretical and applied conferences, I maintain a list of interested industry contacts, and I exercise my teaching, programming, and writing skills just enough to keep them in shape. I have backups for my backups for my backups if I don't get a tenure-track job, and I would be happy with all of them.

And this doesn't mean a PhD isn't worth doing! My experience, at least, has been immensely satisfying in most respects, and has unlocked many more of these options than I would have had just as an undergraduate looking for a coding job.

apdinin, thanks for sharing your perspective, professionally however, you shared that you chose to go into IT instead of humanities academia.

I see the value of literature in conveying the human experience but don't see the value of literary criticism. I like to read on my own and the direct experiencing with the author with their characters and stories, and forming my own interpretation. I've read Harold Bloom's literary criticism and found it wanting, like an old man hanging onto the vestiges of the past century of whatever someone called the "Western Cannon" and isn't his theory of authors' "anxiety of influence" a bit formulaic, a little bit derivative, a little bit obvious. Not everyone attended Execter and then attended Yale and took Harold Bloom and Bloom's mentor's literary course and read from Shakespeare to Dickson to Faulkner, and said "yes" eagerly and thusly beamed at his literary professor's exaltations as the sunbeams shifted dramatically its orientation on late New England spring afternoons through the ivied windows in the harrowed lecture hall. How do you go about to qualify Jack Kerouac and Murakami who takes as much influence from Jazz? Or novels composed of text messages?

Conversely, I form my own interpretation from Zora Neale Hurston and Richard Wright and find it a bit presumptuus that these so-called "multi-cultural" AFAM professors cram down their sociological manifestos down in their criticism; why should I care about the African American or Chicano experience told by Henry Gates Sr. pontificating, when I care about my upbringing as an Asian American and see only through that selfish lenses and rightfully so; and instead like the strong black female characters' sexual awakening and relate to the search for that sexual fulfillment under the strict matriarchy and small-mindedness of her ethnic community that has internalized that hatred and hierachies that was imposed upon them such that the enemy has slowly become themselves,

Our reading experiences is a sensuous, viceral and private one and I don't see why a literary professor's interpretation of that great work is worth than my love for erotica or Michael Crichton or a mom's love for Anne Rice or a monkey's love for a banana. As for comparing literature to coding, coding in the sense of "startup's, exit's" is like comparing Emily Dickson to the slave traders traveling in tugboats in deep south, individual monastic pursuit vs. merchantile activity. Emily may be poorer but she certainly didn't feel a need to overcompensate with digital humanities.

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