[nmaley]

Majored in Philosophy. Started programming in 1973 on mainframes. Became a full time developer, systems analyst. 72 years old now, with 50 years experience in IT. Co-founded a couple of start ups, made a little bit of money. Went back to corporate life for a while. Ended up as a Program Architect at Salesforce. Resigned to start a company which develops and delivers commercial LLM/RAG solutions. Going reasonably well. Simple principles: keep learning, do what you want to do, not just what the man tells you. I saw a note from another Philosophy grad saying that Philosophy is actually useful in that it gives you a framework and a perspective to look at things a little differently. I agree with that.

[mettamage]

Could you give an example of how it helps you look at things a little differently?

I found that when I talked to my old roommate (he has a philosophy bachelor + master degree) that my programming experience helped a lot in talking about philosphy.

[nmaley]

I've spent a lot of my career doing various types of solution design. One of the insights I gained from thinking a lot about representation, intentionality and the philosophy of language is that the way you represent a problem has a big influence on how easy you will find it to solve the problem. I've found that helps with solution design. Don't just think about the problem. Think about what is the best way to represent the problem.

[datadrivenangel]

Also a philosophy grad. Good philosophy programs force you to practice aggressively thinking logically, to the point of teaching symbolic logic which is basically coding.