
Ask HN: Any philosophy grads who have turned into hackers? - andkon
Like the title says. If I&#x27;m not mistaken, pg was an undergrad philosophy major. Anyone else find coding after graduating, or maybe while still in school? How was the transition? What things did you get hung up on or find easy?<p>Do you feel like it helps in other functions of startup life, say product management?
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ACow_Adonis
Not a startup here. But my formal qualification is a bachelor of economics,
and a bachelor of arts with majors in philosophy/religious studies. I started
doing computer science, but changed courses after first year because, frankly,
I found it WAY too boring. I was getting pretty good grades too, but couldn't
see myself sitting through two more years to do the kind of programming work
they were trying to impose upon us (basically preparing us for faceless
industry production jobs in my opinion, this was around 2000 or so, don't know
if its changed since then) :P

That's not the most common mix, so i've probably just de-anonymised myself :P

At the time of writing this I'm employed by the government to write
algorithms, do analytics and produce numbers. I guess I'm pretty much a data
scientist. I wrote this:
[https://communities.sas.com/docs/DOC-2462](https://communities.sas.com/docs/DOC-2462)
in my spare time, and now i'm working on a similar/analytics project written
in Common Lisp.

I can't really speak for the philosophy degree itself, but I definitely prefer
working with other people who are philosophically inclined. People with a wide
array of interests and questioning, skeptical minds. I've found you'll hear a
lot of things from the tech community which are taken on face value, which
could be said for most areas of life. Personally, there's a whole bunch of
marketing material and propaganda out there in machine learning, stats, big-
data and AI circles at the moment on what things actually do or can actually
do, and I feel having already been involved with some of the philosophy of
such fields helps me separate the wheat from the chaff because I've already
considered the nature of knowledge, what we can know, and what we can find
out.

But on the other hand it can be somewhat frustrating, because there's another
personality type that appears a lot in compsci/numbers/engineering who most
certainly does not want to deal with theory/ambiguity, and indeed they were
attracted to the field in part because they thought they wouldn't have to deal
with such ambiguities.

That and I find myself analyzing/taking apart whatever system I'm in, and i
quickly become uncomfortable with it, which means moving around jobs/projects
alot. But that might just be a general intelligence/hacker thing, and not
specifically a philosophy thing.

Well, that was rambly...

~~~
andkon
Oh man, this resonates. I think in any organization you need a certain balance
of those two personalities - but the philosophy degree sure makes the
questioning/skeptical folks more my type. And until I started my own company,
I moved around a lot too. But now that I'm leading things that sort of
incisive thinking is a boon (sometimes).

When you say you get uncomfortable with a system, though, d'you mean
ethically? Or just bored?

~~~
ACow_Adonis
Honestly, in my own experience, which I'm loathe to use as advice for anyone
else, I've had experiences that fall into both.

Bored-wise i'll enter a job, get acquainted with a practice, and almost
immediately see failings/things to improve/things I can automate. Then I will.
It'll be great, and then I'll have sorted the problems that exist within the
context of my little environment over which I have control, and everything
will be going 2-3 times better, but then i become bored again... In the best
case scenarios, if there's not scope for any new challenges/problems in the
job/company, I tend to move on amicably at that point.

However, there's been a few points where I've clashed "ethically". And this
probably does have to do with philosophy, because its quite clear I've thought
quite deeply about how I think I should live my life, and the minimum values I
expect those around me to hold, and other's can be quite
surprised/offended/awkward when you don't just go along with it all. I won't
work with certain employers/jobs/industries (probably not what people are
thinking, I'm not religious). So far this hasn't hindered me in terms of
putting food on the table and living a comfortable life, but i accept it could
one day, and I don't know what i'll do if I ever were to fall upon
particularly hard times. But I try to live simply compared to most anyway :P
Generally I try to do the right thing, then I'll leave if i can't. Its only
really happened once so far, and the jobs I find obviously objectionable i've
never applied for/accepted in the first place. I've taken some risks here and
there which other people probably wouldn't have in that regard...

Now, being a general philosophical person, I do wonder about the ethics of
what I do, and god, looking back i've probably got some reflections and
thoughts about that one...but I can sleep comfortably at night and don't
really have any regrets yet :) I'm trying to work towards going it alone (or
at least in charge) myself eventually....

~~~
andkon
That's interesting. Maybe it's 'cause I've just watched the first episode of
Silicon Valley but, for most people, even if you're not doing something
obviously good for the world, there's huge internal pressure to feel as if
you're making a big contribution to some big picture things that matter.

That, I think, is why you get lots of "xyz startup is changing the world!"
rhetoric. Because whether or not it is true, people worry about the optics of
what they do, and need something meaningful to point to. To actually care
about ethics involves making painful choices of the sort that it sounds like
you've done. Say, choices that keep you from dying on the inside, but which
are still painful. So kudos to you.

~~~
ACow_Adonis
See, not trying to bignote myself, but I've kinda gone through a "saving the
world" phase. Not like the Silicon valley people. As in I took a job working
with the unemployed, then I moved jobs to work for a group that works with and
advocates for the homeless. Both have left me incredibly jaded. I thought I
could go in with my gifts and do something for people. I couldn't, not really,
and discovered charities and the like are full of self-interested/damaged
people and politics much like anywhere else.

I know exactly what you're talking about with the startup culture: "Saving the
world with an advertising/smart-phone-app/messaging service". Every time
Zuckerberg opens his mouth I wonder whether he believes or has thought about
what he's saying, whether he's just saying it to use investor money to achieve
his own ends, or whether he's just saying it to try to placate the
public/silicon valley/himself. Which, look, I guess you just have to laugh at
it. But i also guess that not buying into the workplace culture makes such
places awkward to work at.

I'm currently facing new moral dilemmas. Looking to move on again, but I'm
seriously considering some of the grey areas I'd written off before (say
working for big banks), primarily for the money. I reason if they can use me
in a fraud analysis or something, maybe I could live with myself. Anyway,
thanks for the opportunity to think about such things :P

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marwei
I'm not philosophy major but I think my story might be helpful. So I started
my college (in China) as a Business Administration major, then transferred to
UM during Junior year studying Econ. It wasn't until my senior year in college
that I felt in love with code and dived into CS.

Frankly, the business and econ education is not helpful at all for a
programmer. But I guess the hassle I went through did help me become a good
product maker. I mean when you write code for code, you're just writing code;
but when you code with a business perspective, you're making a real, legit
product that actually means something.

To answer your question: the transition was quite difficult. Think installing
Mac OS on a PC. Things I got hung up: gosh so many things. Think installing
Mac OS on a PC... Things I find easy: gosh so many things. Think having a Mac
OS on a PC... Does it help: Yes it helps. I'm always the best programmer in
the business teams, and the best business guy in the technical teams. Knowing
something about everything makes you flexible and capable.

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llamataboot
I have an undergraduate degree in sociology with a concentration in social
theory and a masters in social work with a concentration in research
methodologies. Lots of philosophy in the undergrad degree, and some in the
second. After a decade in the non-profit industry, as a researcher and as a
social worker, I went to a ruby/rails bootcamp and am now employed as a full
stack developer. (I already had a significant amount of HTML/CSS experience
and ran my own company putting together simple-ish Wordpress and Drupal sites
for non-profits for a few years)

I'm not sure if I can pick particular things out and be like, oh understanding
Foucault is particularly good for this aspect of startup life, but in general
I find myself to have a more solid value system than many people i know in the
tech industry, able to figure things out quicker and on my own, and generally
find my knowledge much more well-rounded.

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pjlegato
I have a BA with a double major in philosophy and history. Turns out that
nobody will pay you to do either of those, so I am a programmer. I had started
programming many years earlier, as a child, so there wasn't really any
transition.

I have never run into any problems related to not having a CS degree. The tech
industry is, in general, the most purely meritocritous social and business
system I've seen. If you can demonstrate an ability to write quality working
code, nothing else matters, they'll hire you. (The very few tech industry
people who care about you having a CS degree as such are not often people
you'd want to work for anyway.)

Having a phil degree helps in better understanding other people's worldviews,
which is indirectly useful in many areas of startup life.

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nathell
A friend of mine has majored in philosophy at University of Warsaw, Poland,
and now works at Google in Mountain View. His wife, also a philosophy grad,
has co-founded a startup headquartered in CA, Wellfitting.com.

~~~
andkon
Hah, not the best link to open in a busy café :) But kudos to them! I'd love
to know what the philosophy -> google progression was like.

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gphil
Yep, I have a BA in Philosophy, have been employed as a Software Engineer, and
am now the CTO of a SaaS startup.

I got into web stuff before going to college, but decided that a CS major
wasn't really for me even though I wanted to make software for a living.
Philosophy was my favorite subject so I decided to major in it. I don't regret
that decision at all. I think my coursework has been very valuable to my
career (even if not all employers would necessarily agree) in terms of my
analytical thinking and problem-solving skills.

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aba_sababa
I studied philosophy, and I also tacked on a CS degree. In retrospect, the CS
degree wasn't necessary - all the programming I needed to know for a job I was
able to pick up on the side and by going to hackathons. I really treasure my
philosophy degree - it taught me how to think holistically and it trained me
to find weak spots, poke holes, and strengthen, all of which come in handy in
engineering and in broader thinking about the state of the world.

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cafard
Yes. Well, programmer.

I found it well after graduation from college, when I needed to get data from
point a to point b without re-keying. Eventually, I went back to school and
got a master's in computer science.

I would say that the ability to think abstractly, and the experience of having
to express yourself clearly, help.

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ohyes
I have a BA in philosphy and am employed as a programmer. It's been pretty
good to me. Skepticism, logic, and good communication are important for any
job. I went back and got an MS is CS because I wanted the technical background
in a more formal way.

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snowwrestler
The CTO of Forum One (DC agency) has a BA in philosophy.

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robobro
Philosophy is the basis of happy hacking, I think.

