Ask HN: If you had to get a non-tech masters degree, what would you go for?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46313680

by highwayman47 • 7 months ago

8 12 7 months ago

news.ycombinator.com

Is there any specific program / college / etc outside of tech that you would want to study if you could?

bombcar• 7 months ago

I like finance and business, not sure if I'd go to a masters but anyone doing tech is well rewarded for doing at least some business classes.

Study what you don't know and what is outside your area, and you become substantially more valuable.

E.g., a techie who has some legal understanding or a lawyer with tech experience vs those without.

giaour• 7 months ago

I would probably go for natural resources management or population biology.

Masters degrees are (from my experience in the US workforce) generally only professionally useful when there is an explicit requirement for one set by a professional standards body or codified in law. As in, you usually need a masters to get tenure as a teacher in a public school, and some government jobs have specific and inflexible degree requirements. But for private sector employment, masters degrees are mostly just for personal enrichment.

ryanchants• 7 months ago

I went to college late, so I rushed through. Which meant I didn't take the time to really engage with non-CS classes. So I'd like to go back for that. Especially the below masters, which should attract folks with similar feelings.

https://masterliberalarts.uchicago.edu/curriculum/

sloaken• 7 months ago

If it is 'just for fun' then Philosophy.

If I was recommending for a friend in tech trying to advance their career: MBA

Otherwise something they enjoy.

Looking for a masters in Beer drinking, or camping.

drakonka2• 7 months ago

Do I have to pick? I moved to a university town last year and started registering for whatever sounds interesting. There are so many fascinating things to learn about! My first ever university course ended up being about nuclear weapons. I just finished the second, about the research front in life sciences. Next term I'm hoping to take a cosmology course. And just unofficially dropping in to some philosophy paper reading sessions. I'm only taking one course per term, always part-time evening classes as I work full time so this is purely a recreational thing. I want to study _everything_.

markus_zhang3• 7 months ago

Just curious how do you manage to register those courses? I figured they must need some prerequisite? It would be a boon if they don’t ask for prerequisites.

drakonka2• 7 months ago

These are entry-level courses that don't require previous university studies. There are some basic eligibility requirements, but those are just high-school level. As I gain credits over time there'll be increasingly more options, but even without there are plenty of interesting ground-level courses across different faculties to take.

raw_anon_1111• 7 months ago

An MBA. I dropped out of graduate school almost 25 years ago. My heart wasn’t in it.

I still plan on working for another 15 years [1]. I have been working in cloud consulting for 5 years and I’m a staff consultant now. It’s half management style “what you should do” consulting and half leafing implementations or doing it all myself for smaller projects. I specialize in app dev + cloud.

The mid to end gane is fractional CTO I think or more management style consulting outside of just “application modernization”

[1] don’t cry for me. I work remotely and we travel a lot and do long term stints away from home “digital nomadding”. Work isn’t stressful.

gethly• 7 months ago

I went for physics degree but left after two semesters due to lack of structure and other things(essentially I had no idea what was going on the entire time, what I was supposed to know or do, what books to buy, it was quite a shitshow despite it being the top college in the country for this).

I was wondering that maybe if i am alder and have nothing to do I could try again but I lost interest. I prefer physical things, like martial arts, running and things like that to sitting in a class reading books. Makes no sense to my any more.

markus_zhang3• 7 months ago

Probably Physics. I have always been intrigued by it so might give it a run.

peacemaker• 7 months ago

I went and did a masters degree in Ecology (well, Conservation Ecosystem Management specifically) during covid which I really enjoyed. A lot of it was completely out of my comfort zone after 20+ years in tech but a surprising amount did translate, such as the maths/stats and writing R code.

I felt it made me a better 'thinker' if that makes sense? Learned to be more critical (in a good way) and consider subjects I'd never come across before. I even went and created (and won!) a business pitch to a government org to handle some habitat surveys which was a great experience.

Ask HN: If you had to get a non-tech masters degree, what would you go for?

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