Has an additional non-technical degree/background help you in your software career?

Question

I'm just curious how many people are out there like me. I have a degree in History and Computer Science. Who else has a second degree or maybe the equivalent in experience in something other than a technical field? How has it prepared you for your software engineering career? (has it?) What advantages, if any, do you feel you have gained over your colleagues who focused solely on technical skills in the past? What disadvantages?

Answer 1

I believe any degree doesn't teach you a whole lot about a subject, it more teaches you how to learn (and how to enjoy life as a student :p)

I can't remember anything from university as such, everything has been self taught.

So you may find yourself at an advantage as you are able to learn things very quickly.

Answer 2

I have a bachelor in chemistry and worked as a paramedic. While those things do not help me in any way with programming, I believe that they give me a broader understanding of how non-programmers think. That has two advantages:

1. It helps me to better communicate with the customer.
2. Sometimes it helps me to break away from my regular patterns of thought and instead think outside the box.

The first has much more impact on my day to day work though, because the second happens not often enough.

Answer 3

I have a Bachelor's in Geology and a Masters in Project Management. Did they help me? Certainly. My first job out of college was doing seismic work for an old-school company. Let me tell you, it takes very little time of doing hand-analysis of large seismic data sets before you decide that there has to be a better way. I started with Excel, since that's what I knew. I then started using VBA macros. I outgrew those and moved to VB proper. I then moved to C and C++ and then to C#. Each move was because I wanted to do something that the current technology wouldn't do what I wante.

Now I've been "hobby programming" since I was probably 8, but never considered it as a career path. Everything was self-taught and now, some 30 years later, I find myself the owner of a software consulting company.

Answer 4

For me my history degree has given me the following advantages

• It shows well on my resume, that I am interested in learning things outside of my standard field of expertise, that I can have a fair amount of breadth to my knowledge, and that I'm not afraid to be curious about something completely outside "the box" of my main career.
• I write more effectively. This helps me crystalize my thoughts about problems or technical ideas. Writing can be a sort of self-programming where thoughts and ideas are organized into something that makes sense. Its a tool I use mostly for my own benefit. Then also, occasionally others will read what I wrote and be able to better understand a situation. I can better communicate in simple things such as bug reports and emails. Through writing and crystallizing my best understanding of something, I work to control the explosion of miscommunication and misunderstanding that is so rampant at technical companies.
• I learned a great deal about researching completely random stuff. My experience has been that programming is hardly done in a vacuum. There is usually a domain that your software is targeted toward. To some extent, when working in that domain, you need to become a domain expert. This involves lots of research. The same kind of research that I did extensively looking into some obscure historical matter. There's a lot of projects where I've spent the majority of the project researching the domain field to automate some task seen as mundane in the domain field.

Answer 5

In almost any profession (note the almost, since we are not talking about people with doctorates - at least, I am not) experience is the catalyst to advancement.

I originally started with a Civil Engineering major and switched to a Computer Science major in my sophomore year. Shortly after, I actually left college to join what was becoming a hot job market as a developer. Most of my knowledge was from being a self-taught hobbyist with a little exposure to freelancing for local businesses in high school - basic stuff like inventory apps and simple POS systems.

My experience with my path of Civil Engineering with a Music minor has not added anything to my career. And although I did return to school on a part-time basis after the fact, I found that the most valuable things I had were not from any form of education - that being a passion for software development and a desire to keep learning things within my field.

I think that the validity of degrees is not as relevant as it once was, and part of it might be due to the fact that course material in this industry is outdated by the time it is published. Getting into the trenches and earning your battle scars is the most helpful thing that anyone can do for themselves, as the most important things that you need to learn are things that come with time through both success and failure.

Answer 6

I am not sure if this would help in strict career terms i.e. will it get you a bigger salary and faster promotion.

Having a non CS degree is probably an advantage for your day to day activities in IT. In most corporate IT environments the big challenges tend to revolve around communication. Tying to understand what the business really wants, telling them politely they can't have it etc.

In my experience CS graduates are superb at delivering first class well coded beautifully designed systems which do almost exactly what the project sponsers did not want.

Answer 7

My degree is in Political Science with minors in History and Math. What that gave me was a good solid foundation in research and writing skills (a mimimum of five and usually more research papers per sememster). History and Poli Sci are all about analysis once you get past the freshman level.

Since I am a specialist in databases, I could not be as effective if I had not learned to undestand what data means and how to interpret it. Political science also taught me a lot about internal corporate politics.

My degree got me my job as a management analyst which 12 years later directly led to my interest in database design and reporting and my conversion to being an IT person. I have no doubt that all those years as a user of data (I used literally hundreds of different databases through the years) has made me much more aware of what users need, what doesn't work (I've queried some of the most poorly designed systems you can imagine) and how to talk to users. I find the users where I currently work tend to reach out to me first because they know I understand their perspective and will make sure the rest of the team understands it as well.

As a plus, as a management analyst (a job I would not have gotten without a liberal arts degree, we only hired technical degreed people if they had industrial engineering degrees), I was formally trained in how to collect data and how to interview people to get better, more accurate information. Those skills have come in handy through my career.

Answer 8

I have a minor in history, and it does absolutely nothing for me professionally. But I know far more about medieval siege warfare than the average person, and I can tell the difference between the war in Iraq and Vietnam. Probably some degrees (math?) would help, but in my case it was education for its own sake, which is still worthwhile

Answer 9

My degree is in Computer Science and I have minors in mathematics and creative writing. The minor in creative writing has gotten me more than one second look, both in and out of interviews.

This has helped me in my career: it's always good to know how to write, and a few of my classes for the cw minor focused on technical writing. End result: I can write accurate, specific requirements, and usually have an advantage in understanding what was truly meant by less-specific requirements.

I think that it's ALWAYS useful to know more, and try to learn everything I can, be it tech related or not. The only downside is that time you spend learning non-tech-related things is time you could have spent learning tech-related things...but we can't let technology dominate our lives, now can we?