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Comment by Schlagbohrer

2 days ago

I'm glad you pointed this out because I think the difference is due to philosophy grads being ready and willing to enter the workforce as a welder or an au pair or a restaurant manager, whereas a CS grad is gonna hold out for a CS job.

Source: all the B.A. Philosophy grads I know who entered basically any job they could get, often including the trades, and knew during their degree that that would be their path. But wow are they more interesting to talk with and more well rounded than a tech-head who turned up their nose at their humanities prereqs during university and as a result know nothing about the world outside of their narrow field.

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Schlagbohrer

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Suppafly  1 hour ago

Isn't a philosophy also a popular pre-law degree? A lot of these sorts of articles neglect to account for the actual reality of how these degrees are used.

keiferski  2 days ago

Philosophy major here that went from working in a bakery, to sales at a large apparel printing company, to writing and marketing at startups.

I do wonder if CS grads are too often narrowly focused on “tech” companies and not on companies that need software.

  • bluGill  2 days ago

    Software tends to be complex enough that you need a lot of people and thus a tech company. It rarely makes sense for a company to make their own software that they only use to internally. Many non tech companies makes their own software but it is shipped to customers as part of the product

    • saturn8601  2 days ago

      >It rarely makes sense for a company to make their own software that they only use to internally.

      From my understanding China operates this way. They supposedly have such an oversupply of software engineers that every company just build all the software they need internally. Now with AI they have supposedly been super aggressive in adopting it that its probably even more of the case that everyone is building most of what they need internally.

    • keiferski  2 days ago

      Eh it depends. I’ve worked at / with a lot of more traditional non-tech companies and you’d be amazed at how a lot of the software looks like Excel circa 1995.

      I guess they could be using third party software but it seems like often they are just using an ancient thing they built themselves.

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