[qsymmachus]

I see that STEM chauvinism is still alive and well on Hacker News.

Believe it or not, there are some skills you can pick up studying the humanities that will set you apart from your CS major peers. Being able to write and communicate clearly, for example, is pretty much a super power in most tech jobs.

[ideals]

The way I look at it now after working for large and small tech companies, the Stem degree will help you land your first job because you can be extremely green as long as you have that stem BS.

However a self taught programmer with a humanities degree can also get to the same position with some sweat equity.

Once at the position of software developer the person with the humanities degree takes off.

They've learned to write, they learned to talk and be communicative amongst friends and colleagues. Your job will let you learn as you go wrt to tech, but not as much with soft skills. where the stem grad is still that weird awkward guy who gets into arguments about pedantics, the humanities person is writing proposals and building a network.

The stem person needs to put in a lot more work on the soft skills they never learned, especially if they want to rise in the rankings, this is where the humanities person has that leg up

[leetcrew]

does getting a humanities degree improve one's soft skills, or do people that already have good soft skills choose and succeed in humanities degrees?

I took several upper-level humanities courses in college (almost enough to get a classics minor), but I don't really feel like they improved my ability to communicate/network in the office. in my experience, these courses teach the material and the skill of writing a very specific kind of formal research paper that doesn't have much to do with business or technical writing. while you don't directly use a lot of the concepts you learn in a CS degree, I find the technical background much more useful in my day-to-day work.

[langitbiru]

Sometimes I wonder why we have to choose. Why can't we take STEM degree and learn humanities from Coursera/Khan Academy. Or we take humanities degree and learn programming from Coursera/EdX/Youtube.

[snowwrestler]

You don't have to choose; there is plenty of time during a four-year college education to do both. Plenty of people double major across STEM and humanities. Or if you don't want that level of commitment, you can create breadth with your electives.

[qzx_pierri]

You were a bit vague, but STEM has the highest concentration of job options that can pay you $60-70k straight out of college.

Well other than finance, but you could argue that STEM is heavily mixed into that field of study (and its derivatives) as well (mathematics, technology, data science)

[biophysboy]

Even in pure STEM jobs, like physics academia (where I work), writing/skill is probably the most important skill you need to develop to be a working, publishing scientist.

[icedchai]

One of the most talented developers I ever met was an English major. This was about ~20 years ago. The C code this guy produced was unbelievable.