Jobs fight: Haves vs. the have-nots

Why do people hate on arts students? I graduated at a college with many arts students. Admittedly, a top tier college (Merton, Oxford), but they were still doing these arts degrees which people hate on so much.<p>I got a great job after I graduated, at Google, but it's nothing compared to what many of my arts student peers did after they graduated.<p>My roommate studied classics. HN would laugh at that - what an idiot! He's now leading a team in a private intelligence agency that provides intelligence to companies working in places like Africa or China. He's done amazing stuff. He worked on the ground in Somalia, he's lived in Russia, France, China.<p>Another friend of mine studied Ancient English. What a moron, hey! He's now a Captain in the British Army. He's served in Afghanistan and Iraq. He's currently on secondment to the Pentagon.<p>Another friend did French Literature. Didn't he know he'd never get a job? Actually he's a top investment banker in London. He earns six times what I do at Google. What an idiot hey!<p>Another guy, didn't know him really but he was in my college, is now an MP - equivalent of the US house of representatives. He studied History. Didn't he know it would't lead anywhere.<p>I feel like an idiot for doing CS. Many of those companies wouldn't have hired me as I look like a geek with no social skills. Now I'm at a top job for my field at Google, and I learn less than most of my peers who did arts.<p>People who get STEM degrees become workers. Some of them found great companies, but not many. My arts students peers became leaders, politicians, managers at the top of massively important companies and agencies.

&#62; Big companies are not going to take care of you<p>This is the best takeaway IMHO. I think the way he characterizes liberal arts isn't quite hitting the mark, however. My experience is that there's less wrong with liberal arts schools/degrees as there is with the legions of young people who wander into university with no real plan, and expect to get a job when they graduate with and English degree (which they decided on in their third year).<p>Gone are the days where everyone should try and go to college after high school, even if they don't know what they want from it. It's too expensive now, and a BA doesn't serve you well if you have no plan for how to use it. Many would be better just starting working and see where that takes them; college can come later. Many more would do better to just take up a trade, go to a school for that. We'll need plumbers, electricians, and other service-oriented specialists for a long time to come. But so many "office jobs" that required no real skill have been and are being replaced by computers; there isn't the previous cushion for the aimless recent BA graduate to fall on any more.

Monetarily, the statistics pan out and STEM graduates earn more than liberal arts majors. But is that everything? There's a lot to be said for curiosity as a motivator for work - a lot of us here dive in to side-projects with zero care for monetary reward after. It's just to scratch an itch. Everybody has different itches to tend to.<p>Personally, I am an Art graduate (with a minor in Advertising). I graduated in May 2012 and have a 40hr/week job doing iOS development, getting paid more than I ever have (still not satisfied haha). Some of my peers on the Advertising side are really struggling for work, scrambling together portfolios to land an unpaid internship at one of the top agencies. I saw that landscape when I was still a student and diversified my skills - I started making apps, sans-CS (which is rather freeing once you get past some initial hurdles). I'd like to believe I'm a fairly competent iOS developer, coder and problem solver in general. Math was always my best subject throughout school, but the engineering school failed to scratch my itch. So did the business school, and the psychology curriculum, and really the advertising curriculum as well (but I had to get the degree sometime). I love art though. Learning about the importance of craftsmanship and really pouring my energy into creating something of aesthetic value is what I learned from my art degree. That was monetarily invaluable to me, despite paying tuition for those lessons.<p>I'm now on a STEM-ish career path with a liberal arts degree, albeit a little behind someone with a pure engineering background, but I'm a sponge when it comes to the new material - and it's all learnable.<p>Now that I'm at the end of my rant, I think the point of what I was trying to say is that Liberal Arts aren't a thing of the past, and can be very valuable. It's a little intellectually dishonest to believe that only CS based education is good.

It is really tiring when the answer to emergent large scale economic insecurity in developed nations is "be the best" or "be in one particular field". Not everyone is cut out to be an engineer, and there is a tipping point for economic insecurity where civil unrest threatens the established order. The best and the brightest can't exist in isolation, harvesting the rewards of a larger than ever economy while the middle and lower classes slide into destitution. At some point they will simply revolt and demand redistribution of the automated, capital intensive economy.

I have a liberal arts degree, and I've been a residential carpenter for the last 13 years. I guess the money I earn puts me in the middle class. Looking back on that time it's fair to say I've left a lot of money on the table by not seeking a higher-paying job.<p>I don't think it's arguable that a Google engineer will not make more money than a carpenter on my crew. The thing that bothers me about articles like this is the sense that technocrats like Andreesen assume their needs are everyone else's.

An article that contains this sentence doesn't inspire confidence: "Programmers write in binary math, all zeroes and ones."

I actually believe if you are thinking 20 or 30 years down the line your are actually going to need to have the AI merged into your own brain just to stay relevant, nevermind a job. The unaugmented humans will be, relatively speaking, mentally challenged.