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> Your Classicist will find it harder than your CS guy to write good OO code

True but in my US & UK corporate experience we found that someone with a humanities degree and a Masters or Diploma in CS was by far the best hire for any technology position that had end-user exposure. A mixture of analytical, deductive and soft-skills that the inverse combination never seemed to match.

Perhaps found it harder to write good ( smart or super-efficient ) OO code but could usually write decent code to better-researched and specified requirements.




I don't see hw studying humanities gives you any more soft skills than studying computer sceince. That the sort of thing you would get from a sales job, not from sitting in a library. Maybe comp-sci just filters for the real nerds earlier.


Spending all day studying something seems to encourage people to go out and do related things in their off time. And they get better at them.

Do you really think that the soft skill building activities are equally likely to be popular among the people you meet in a humanities class compared to one in a computer science class?

And you also seem to be completely dismissing the ability of education to give you tools to better understand and contextualize situations you encounter in the real world.

If you asked two students to try to understand a complex biological system and one was a computer science major and the other a philosophy major which do you think would do better? It's probably the one who has a lot of practice building models of abstract systems, even if they are of a type that's more squishy than they are used to.

Now take those same two people and ask them to convince someone of something while knowing only a few things about them, the one who is used to thinking about various different belief systems and world views is going to find it much easier to identify with someone different from them.


> Now take those same two people and ask them to convince someone of something while knowing only a few things about them, the one who is used to thinking about various different belief systems and world views is going to find it much easier to identify with someone different from them.

Different paradigmas of programming (say, logical (Prolog), imperative, functional (Haskell), aspect-oriented, etc.) also represent various belief systems. The same can be said about nearly every aspect of computer science, say computer architecture (CISC vs. RISC, VLIW, superscalar vs. not superscalar, in-order vs. out-of-order, memory models (weak vs. strong) etc.), building blocks for algorithms (say, divide & conquer, dynamic programming, different kinds of tree data structures that make different runtime compromises, etc.), etc.

So also in computer science you are confronted with lots of belief systems and world views.


Then you hire someone who studied CompSci with humanities as minor (at many German universities you need to take one course per semester in a non-CompSci field for CompSci).




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