Humanitarian - what does it mean? Who is a humanist and how does he differ from a technician? Why are we divided into techies and humanists? How to turn from a humanitarian into a techie

Recently I came across news on the portalZelenograd. ru "Lyceum 1557 and School 853 open 10th grade engineering classes". The article tells how two schools in Zelenograd are opening two engineering classes (before that they were physics and mathematics) and are also planning to open medical classes. We are talking about tenth grade.

There doesn't seem to be anything wrong. There will obviously be demand for these classes among students and parents. This demand is generated by modern attitudes towards school education. If once upon a time in the distant Soviet times the purpose of school education was to transfer to children a wide range of fundamental knowledge, then today school education necessary solely to enroll in a university. Well, or whatever you have to do, but do it. Often, even from fully grown people, you can hear discussions about wasted school years studying unnecessary physics and chemistry or other subjects that they did not need in their future professional life. Listening to this, one is taken aback, but this is the reality.

So in Zelenograd engineering classes are opening according to exactly this approach - why waste time on unnecessary literature and history when you can “to introduce students to the practice and research work, prepare graduates for admission to technical universities"?

I apologize for being rude, but I must call a spade a spade and explain that this approach to education is not in any way unique (this is the word used in the Zelenograd note). This is a way of training at best artisans, or more precisely, slaves. A shoemaker has no need for literature; it is enough for him to be given a leather knife from childhood and taught to cut and sew. He will be a good shoemaker. The nurse doesn’t need to know that the Earth is round; let her learn how to give injections and smear green on abrasions. And the engineer does not need to think at all about the significance of Alexander Nevsky’s conquests for Russian history, let him silently solder his circuit boards.
The illusion that all this will be made up in universities is groundless.

Of course, they teach differently everywhere, but the author of these lines constantly discovers in his head emptiness in knowledge, for example, history, despite the fact that National history at the university I passed with a 5.

And here I want to fall into nostalgia and finally reveal the content of the title of the note. How I became a technician. I identified myself as a techie back in my school years. The teachers themselves tried to divide us all the time - some were techies, some were humanists, and some were medical biologists.

For some reason, my biology teachers thought that I showed promise in this area. I was really interested, but somehow I didn’t want to connect my life with it. Or maybe I didn’t come across such an authoritative person who would pull me to this side. I think it was possible. That is, the biological component of learning has always been perceived by me as an interesting hobby.

It’s a different matter with the humanities: Russian language, literature, history. Due to the fact that I read a lot of books, I perceived the Russian language intuitively, and this intuition gave me a stable 4, and if I strained a little, even a 5. Literature lessons were something difficult. Although I read books, almost all of them were not related to school curriculum. Therefore, I tried not to enter into discussions on literature. We were not particularly taught how to write essays. Yes, actually, they weren’t taught at all. They said that I needed to describe how I spent the summer or that Katerina was a ray of light in a dark kingdom. And then write what feels right to you. Naturally, it turned out badly. The worst and the most good essays usually read. They didn't read mine.

The story was really bad. When reading history textbooks, I experienced terrible torment and complexes, since I could not understand anything at all. I didn’t see the point of remembering dates. Now I understand that it was really impossible to understand anything from these textbooks. It was only possible to stupidly remember. This has little to do with history at all. These were not history textbooks, but collections of disconnected events and information.
And in the midst of all this, mathematics rose! You could follow the logic in the textbooks. Solving problems and examples had tangible results that could be verified. All this despite the fact that there are also many complaints about mathematics textbooks. Besides, I was just lucky that in grades 10-11 she really came to us good teacher mathematics. Galina Andreevna. She began to give our excellent students grades of two and three. And I liked it. The excellent students cried, their mothers ran to school and started a scandal. But the teacher's authority prevailed. We really didn't know anything. And she began to teach us. And she taught. And that was the little that I took away from school.

That's how I became a technician.

There was one episode in 11th grade. A young director came to our school and began leading a theater group. A couple of months later we staged the play. The performance was banter on the topic of medicine. Nothing special. But after watching the performance, the aforementioned mathematics teacher Galina Andreevna said: “And yet you are humanists.”

I don’t presume to say that Galina Andreevna was right. But the fact is that today I feel a lack of humanitarian knowledge, as well as a bitter feeling that a lot of time has been lost.

A person cannot only be a shoemaker, an engineer, or a doctor. Where is the man then? How can he make his way through the philosophical questions that life poses to him? How to solve these issues without breadth of knowledge?

And Fursenko was not so straightforward when he said that his task was to educate qualifiedconsumers. His task is to raise a slave.

Humanists are those who are friends with words, images and are often completely at odds with material world. These are such enthusiastic people who can quote Dante in the original, but even the device of a stepladder can baffle them. That is, their knowledge does not seem to have any practical benefit. This is what gives techies a vast field for jokes and all sorts of jokes. But if you look at it, humanitarian skills are no less important than technical ones.

Use your strengths

Communication skills

And at any level and on any scale. If you are looking for a job, it will be easier for you to find one because you know how to approach people. Even if you are not looking, you may be offered a promising place because you communicate a lot and know how to do it correctly. If you represent a company, your ability to establish contact with the client will be valued as highly as the development of a quality product.

Language

Humanists know how to speak and write in a way that everyone can understand. In an increasingly complex world, this skill comes to the fore. Explain multi-level algorithms and technical terms accessible language It becomes more and more difficult, which means that such a skill is gaining significant weight in the labor market.

High EQ

EQ is the ability to recognize other people's emotions. Paired with a hefty IQ, it gives you superpowers. It is easier to upgrade it for those who know psychology and can understand motivation. As a rule, these are people with a humanitarian mindset. It is not difficult for them to put together a strong team and maintain a friendly atmosphere in the team.

Of course, that's not all strengths, but even this is enough for a humanitarian to survive in modern world.

Always keep evolving

It is important to develop all qualities as a whole. While representatives of technical professions can concentrate on one highly specialized area, for humanists this is an unaffordable luxury.

Even the highest EQ is of no use to anyone when your communication skills are zero. It's best if you combine your humanitarian knowledge and some technical skills. For example, learn to program at least at the most basic level or take a web design course.

Feel free to explore the high tech industry

It is in the IT field that combinations of humanitarian and technical skills are most needed. Complex code must be turned into a clear and pleasant user interface, and for this you need to combine computer knowledge with an understanding of what the average person wants. Steve Jobs was the first to realize this. Apple's success is clear proof of this.

Now the rest of the bosses of Silicon Valley have realized the importance of conductors between technology and people. Facebook recruiters are looking for non-technical and technical specialties in a ratio of 3:2. At Uber in the summer of 2015, there were three humanitarian vacancies for every engineering vacancy.

Entrepreneur and billionaire Mark Cuban believes that within 10 years the demand for humanities majors will be greater than the demand for programmers or even engineers.

He adds that machines will take over the work with algorithms and data, so philologists and philosophers will become much more in demand. If you are a humanities major and for some reason decide to retrain, think about whether you will regret this step in a few years.

Survival checklist

• Identify your best qualities.
• Develop them in combination with technical skills.
• Make something cool and post it on social media.
• Talk to people. Charm is your main assistant.
• Don't be ashamed that you are a humanitarian, but be proud of it. Your mother most likely loves you just the way you are. But it is not exactly.

Today, the dispute between physicists and lyricists seems to have been finally resolved in favor of the physicists. What kind of art will we leave as a legacy to our grandchildren? Graphic design of a mobile application, a neural network capable of creating pictures, games based on virtual reality? But what happened to the thousands of humanists who were preparing to live life in a calmer and more contemplative rhythm? Some of them, following the vocation and trends of the century, became programmers. Discourse talked with former “lyricists” who became “techies” about why they changed their profession, how they mastered a new specialty and whether their humanitarian knowledge in the field of technology was useful to them.

When I was studying at high school, our parallel was divided into several specialized areas: a class for the humanities, a physics and mathematics class, a chemical and biological class and... general! To get in general class for some reason it was considered bad form. I studied in physics and mathematics for a year, and then transferred to humanities, because it was hard for me to keep up with the techies. I confess that since then the stereotype that all people can be divided into categories according to their abilities still lives in me. This is partly why this material matured. I wanted to understand: is it possible to enter into an argument with nature and prove that even if you are a humanitarian, if you want, you can master mathematics? I wanted to understand if I could change my consciousness, reconfigure my brain to a different register and achieve success in something I couldn’t do before? Do you need any special inclinations or can everything be overcome with just desire, perseverance and willpower?

I myself studied at the philology department of RUDN University, taught foreign languages, and now I’m writing code, so, probably, everything is possible. But am I doing the right thing by spending time not on developing the abilities given to me by God and nature, but on constantly challenging myself? This question still torments me, and therefore I tried to get an answer to it from five people who were able to make the transition from a humanitarian profession to writing code or skillfully combine both.

“My life is a chain of incredible accidents”

My name is Alexander Gusev, I am 23 years old, I was born and studied in Moscow. Graduated from the Russian State University for the Humanities with a degree in Oriental Studies. African Studies,” was supposed to become a sinologist. Now I live in the city of Eilat, Israel. I work at Trucknet, writing code mainly in JavaScript.

The story of how I became a programmer is very illogical. It is still difficult for me to understand how everything happened. My mother is a cyberneticist by training. However, she decided that I should study oriental studies because she could get me a relevant job after college. For two years I prepared for the Unified State Examination in history and English, and three months before the exam my mother asked me: “Listen, maybe you should go for programming after all?” I answered her: “Yes, there are already three months left before the Unified State Exam, it’s too late.” So I entered the Russian State University for the Humanities on a budget, and this is the only reason why I continued to study there.

When I entered, my relationship with my mother became complicated. At the age of 17, I began to live with a girl, and I had to somehow earn a living. I didn’t know how to program then, but I took the opencart engine, created an online store on it and began resell iPhones from America. And then this incident happened. I worked as a waiter in Atrium, and because I worked well, I became friends with the sales director. His name was Alexey Dmitrievich, as I remember now. This man greatly influenced me future fate. How was it? All my free time from work, I sat in the back room of the restaurant with a laptop, because I continued to sell iPhones, and Alexey Dmitrievich noticed this. He asked if I could help him solve one problem within the restaurant, formulated the first technical specification in my life and said that he would pay 70 thousand. The amount was large for a second-year student. I took it. I knew that if I couldn’t cope, my programmer friends would help.

Looking ahead, I will say that I did it, and I enjoyed doing it. Not because of the money, but because of the drive. For the two months that I was doing the program for the restaurant, I slept four hours a day. I was there around the clock. It was very difficult. But the fact is that it was not only hard for me, but also very interesting. I drove my friends by car to the club and sat in the car programming. It was more interesting to me than going to a club. I did this all the time. And at some point I won’t say that I felt better, that something clicked somewhere, but my enthusiasm dried up a little. I realized that life is not limited to programming. This happened a year after I started doing it.

After I made the technical specifications for the restaurant, I went into mobile development, learned what 1C was, and for the next five years I found customers among friends and friends of my parents who needed a website. Basically, I didn’t work full-time until I moved to Israel. For three years I wrote in Ruby (a server-side programming language - editor's note), then all the functionality of the site could be done in JavaScript (a multi-paradigm programming language - editor's note). And now I wrote the Discourse website entirely in JavaScript.

In general, my whole life is a chain of incredible coincidences. I came to Israel through a student program. And then at one party here in Eilat, when the dollar had grown very much and I especially needed a job, I met a man who launched the only startup in the whole city. I told him what I could do. And he says: come to work tomorrow. No interviews, no anything. As a result, I became the only programmer in the entire startup. And now, a year later, I already have four subordinates: three specialists who deal with the visual part of the site and one server programmer.

Now I can already say that programming is mine. That I still go to work with pleasure and still work hard. Regarding my liberal arts education, I’ll say this. I'm even glad that I didn't go to a technical university. Firstly, I have a lot of friends who coded at university, but, unfortunately, they were taught far from the latest technologies. In programming, everything changes every day. Of course, technical university students know the theory and basics in a way I never dreamed of, but it is also important to know the technologies that are now trending in the labor market in order to get a job. Secondly, the education system is designed in such a way that it kills the thrill of acquiring knowledge... Because of grades, because of not always talented teachers. Maybe if I went to a technical university, I would start learning Chinese there out of a sense of contradiction!

"I want to be free or not be at all"

My name is Vadim Kalinin, I am 44 years old, I was born in the Moscow region and graduated from Moscow State University forests. At one time he was one of the founders of the legendary “Babylon Association of Young Writers”. He has published several books, both in Russia and abroad. Now I live in Hua Hin, Thailand. I write the code on different languages. Mainly PHP, JavaScript, Java. I work on large, long-term web projects. I came to IT from art.

In my youth I was interested in literature and painting, but this brought me almost no money. And interest in Russian artists in the West began to dry up in the 2000s. I worked as a designer for quite a long time. And then a misfortune happened to me. I almost died and, you know, I realized that all the reasons for which I postponed my life for the future were self-deception.

As a child, I dreamed of tropical islands, travel, brave, adventurous friends, and the life of a cosmopolitan. But it turned out that at the age of 35 I had a one-room apartment in the Moscow region and a monotonous social circle, consisting mainly of Moscow writers, creative people, but for the most part not too brave and active. Somehow, I realized very acutely that the nine months of the year that I spent in an apartment or office in the bad Moscow climate were precious time of my life, which I spent in vain.

I realized that I wanted to be free or not be at all. That is, I needed a profession that would not tie me to an office, to a language, to a city, or to anything at all. Programming seemed like a pretty obvious choice to me. Moreover, by that time I had already worked with Flash and was somewhat familiar with ActionScript. In general, at that time I had a very strong motivation. It's possible that I've never been so motivated before. At the very beginning, I had an acute shortage of time for studying. I worked at the computer in the office, came home and sat down at the computer again to study. The weekends were also spent behind the monitor. Soon enough, I turned into a pale, disheveled ghoul with red eyes and permanent depression. My wife saved me from this. She agreed to “put me on her neck” for three months so that I could study in peace. And it gave a wonderful result.

I studied from books published by O'Reilly. Wonderful books. Written good language, qualitatively designed, and the technical level is very, very high. In addition, at one time I was greatly helped to overcome a certain stage in the development of Steve McConnell’s book “Perfect Code” and “Design Patterns” from the Freemans, Katie and Bert. Well, and the most important thing is to parse other people's code. It’s better to see once how a high-quality application is made than to hear about it a hundred times.

Psychological moment. For a long time I lived a kind of light rock and roll loser life. Workaholism seemed somehow unacceptable to me. I had a circle that existed in the same way, and I had to leave this circle. I had to practically give up alcohol and limit my time on social networks. Trampling with a beer near the then still living “OGIs” in the company of “underground geniuses” also had to be excluded. In general, for some time I turned from a Moscow literary partygoer into a kind of mixture of a yuppie and an unshaven computer geek from an American movie. By the way, I never returned to the literary environment. I changed and started to get bored in this environment.

But I don’t believe in “humanities” and “technical people”. There are people who are able to think analytically, design and solve inventive problems, and there are others. It doesn't matter what you're building: a poem, a novel, a painting, or a web application. You are doing engineering work. Programming disciplines the mind. Trains analytical thinking. Having become a programmer, I began to write better texts. I learned how to quickly and effortlessly address the weaknesses in my writing that I had previously struggled with for years. It’s just that time for artistic things has become sorely lacking.

Programming makes a person better. This is a kind of “spiritual path”, only based not on religious lies, but on scientific approach, analysis and rationality.

We have “gurus” and “celestials”, there are legends and myths, there is personal growth, “stages of insight”, “levels of awareness”, that’s all. And all this is fair. Well, and money of course :)

My name is Mila Abramova, I’m 28 years old, I studied to become a recruiting manager at the Russian State University for the Humanities. I live in Moscow, work in a company that deals with system integration of software products; I write mainly in Ruby; I recently started learning Elixir.

Since childhood, I loved to write poetry and short stories; I began to study music at the insistence of my parents, so when I graduated from music, I gave up both the violin and the piano for some time. But later I had a desire to compose, and I began to write songs. There is such a program for mixing, recording and mastering audio tracks - Cubase. The more I immersed myself in the process, the better I mastered this program. And it started spinning. I bought a synthesizer and started playing in bands. First in the gothic darkwave project Mea Vita, and then in Locus Titanic Funus. The second group managed to adapt their electric violin to a guitar synthesizer and use it as a midi controller. This greatly expanded the range of the standard violin sound.

I studied at the university, but I already understood: I didn’t want to work in the specialty I was studying. I was inspired by the opportunity to help people create software projects and directly develop such projects. Moreover, I was good at mathematical analysis, Probability theory, math modeling, information systems and networks, statistics. I was surprised to notice that I was making progress in technical disciplines, although all my life I considered myself a humanist. Even then I had many familiar developers. And the world of technology has always attracted me: it seemed to me that it allows you to create grandiose things from practically nothing. But I always considered myself not capable enough to work in IT. And I just continued to communicate with programmers, slowly listened to the essence of what they were talking about, was inspired by their work - and, in the end, I believed that I myself could find myself in this field.

I took the first step towards real change by going to work as an assistant in the IT department. There, most programs were written in Ruby on Rails and JavaScript. I had to create documentation for them, do testing, analytics, and later participate in design. Actually, at that job I began to understand how web applications work and conducted my first experiments with Ruby and JS. And I got promoted! From an assistant I turned into a project manager. And a little later I received an offer that I couldn’t refuse. I was invited by a company that deals with interactive visualization of Big Data and the creation of infographic analytical systems. I began doing analytics there and coordinating their technical team.

The project was incredibly interesting and exciting; almost every day I gained new, useful knowledge and developed my skills. I felt it was time to learn programming. After all, it is impossible to effectively manage a team and processes whose specifics are not clear enough to you. I believe that the person responsible for the project must understand the principles of its creation from and to: architecture, structure, specifics of the technologies used, etc. Therefore, I decided to study programming in more detail and first took courses on the basics of coding, and then on Ruby on Rails.

Now my work requires not only knowledge and use of technical aspects, but also communication with people, the ability to clearly and intelligibly express thoughts, the ability to organize effective work commands and provide her favorable conditions activities. Therefore, humanities knowledge - psychology, psychophysiology, management and its history, the fundamentals of marketing, law and economics, knowledge of a foreign language - help me every day. In my current job, I am constantly evolving as the technology we use is constantly evolving. I see the results of the work and how they change the world. It's like growing a flower: life appears out of practically nothing, takes shape, and you are one of those who influences what this form will be, what this life will be like - whether this flower will delight others or fade away without having time to bloom . I'm afraid my humanitarian profession would not inspire me as much.

“I have the opportunity to immerse myself in the material from different sides”

My name is Natalia Tyshkevich, I'm 23 years old, I manage the development of a project that is dedicated to personal diaries different people XIX–XX centuries, and I work at the Center for Digital Humanities Research at the National Research University Higher School of Economics. I program in Python (for network analysis of Russian drama) and in R (for statistical analysis of “Prozhito” data). She studied the program “Fundamental and Computational Linguistics” at the National Research University Higher School of Economics, where students are encouraged to consider language from different angles, including being taught automatic text processing, starting with the basics of the Python language and ending with machine learning.

Everyone in my family learned to program: mom, dad, grandma, grandpa, younger brother. I was instilled with a respect for science and an appreciation for human complexity. I deliberately entered the linguistic department in order to approach the analysis of literary texts with new tools that were not part of the arsenal of traditional literary criticism. Fundamental linguistics is directly related to mathematical methods, and many linguists would rather classify their subject as an exact science than as a humanities science.

During my studies, I managed to immerse myself in various problems related specifically to the theory of language. But what was most interesting to me was balancing at the intersection of two areas: computer and theoretical linguistics. My graduation project was a program that, without relying on a dictionary, finds quotes from fiction in newspaper texts. I spoke about my research at the Digital Day of the annual youth conference in Tartu, and was invited to become the organizer of the First Moscow-Tartu School of Digital Humanities, and then invited to the new Center for Digital Humanities Research. At the center, I assembled a scientific and educational group ‘Digital Literary Studies’, where I invited students I knew from different specializations: there were three philologists, four computer linguists, a teacher, a neuropsychologist and a mathematician. We try to find mutual language and together we are engaged in network analysis of Russian drama texts. Although the difference in background makes the work more difficult, it also makes it very interesting!

Initially, with the help of a computer, I wanted to test the theoretical ideas of Russian formalists about the structure of a literary text. But the digital approach allowed us to enter the interdisciplinary field and led to the historical project “Prozhito” (prozhito.org), in which I see great potential for modern humanities scholars. By coming up with joint projects with historians of everyday life, philologists and computational linguists, I have the opportunity to immerse myself in the material from different angles. View it as an archival item in the form of an actual manuscript, as a database entry, or as a summary statistic. This helps, on the one hand, to understand how the genre I describe works, and on the other hand, to expand your horizons regarding the use of digital methods in humanitarian projects.

Since technology is now developing very quickly, and the authorities necessary for the humanities have not yet had time to form, I cannot call myself either a techie or a humanitarian. I consider this division artificial - it is important for me to work at the intersection of areas, because the most interesting things usually elude categorization. Computer tools common to different tasks make it possible to bridge the gaps between scientific interests and radically reshape the entire space of the humanities. Programming skills help me organize a variety of text information and navigate digital world- it looks like vital necessity know how to chop wood and light a stove if you live in the forest.

“My subconscious spoke to me in wonderful dreams”

My name is Yan Brodetsky, I am 30 years old. I live in Moscow. I am writing the client part of electronic banking for legal entities. IN free time I make small toys in JavaScript.

At the age of 14, my parents asked me what I wanted to do. The first thing I said was to program. I was then impressed by the film “Hackers” with the young, beautiful, thick-lipped Angelina Jolie - in general, all this: blue hair under “Prodigy”, the world of electrons and switches against corporations and stupid officials in the name of the good eternal. To all this, my parents said to me: what are you talking about? Have you seen the IT people? These are people with formulas in their eyes - you’re not like that. Let's do something else. By the way, now people who don’t know me well say that I give the impression of a person who thinks in diagrams and structures.

So, my second desire was to become a great Russian writer. Well, you know, so that Dostoevsky, Bulgakov and Brodetsky sound in the same row. My parents told me: go to the journalism department, they teach you how to write (by the way, no). That's how I started doing journalism. I wrote my first articles when I was 14. By the age of 17, I was published in Komsomolskaya Pravda. Nothing outstanding - just all sorts of little things about little animals. Having reached the required minimum for admission, I gave up on it and realized that it wasn’t my thing at all.

In my first year I began working on television. I was the operational graphics editor and assistant director. Fun job. Then I started designing web pages. Then, as a freelancer, I created turnkey websites using Word Press. By the end of university, I didn’t want anything to do with journalism. I wrote some short stories for myself, listened to music, re-read Palahniuk, Mishima, Sorokin, Noon, Thomson and Burgess 100,500 times each. In general, he degenerated as much as he could, but not desperately enough: he didn’t get as far as card games and morphine. Apparently, that’s why writing didn’t work out.

Then I entered graduate school at the Faculty of History. Partly - to resolve the issue with the army, partly - to extend childhood for another three years, partly - I still wanted to protest, but in some way useful for myself. When people ask me how I chose my dissertation topic, I usually say that I didn’t choose the dissertation topic, it chose me.

The fact is that my father, when he was 11 years old, when I was not even in the project, watched a German trophy film about submariners - “U-boote am Feind” or something similar. In general, there are cool guys there, practically pirates, sailing on a diesel flask in the sea and mercilessly drowning enemies. He was so impressed that he tried several times to join the naval corps, but he was not accepted due to his eyesight. When I arrived, our house was full of books about the sea, submarines, World War II and the Germans. Children don’t particularly like to read, so I then leafed through pictures in the encyclopedia about the Third Reich. Therefore, swastikas, skulls and black uniforms did not cause any fear in me. Quite the contrary - it aroused interest in why many people are afraid of these symbols and hate them.

I defended myself, closed this topic for myself and immediately grew up...

I’m lying, it wasn’t easy and it wasn’t immediate, but it was probably too boring, and this doesn’t apply to programming. One way or another, I wanted some kind of activity that brings in money. It took me a long time to spin. First as project managers, then as business analysts - in a startup, in an integrator, in a large corporation. At some point I even tried to return to journalism. In a word, he fought like a fish on ice.

The last straw was Kaspersky Lab. Not because it’s bad there, but because it’s not my thing. It was great working there. There I met some very cool guys from Amsterdam, Tokyo, Moscow, Berlin and Boston. I still communicate with some of them. Another thing is that I didn’t work at all what I wanted.

There are people - so to speak, “businessmen”. They get a return from the fact that they agreed on something, came to an agreement. And there are “crafters”, artisans, those who need to create something more or less material in order to feel their importance and benefit.

So, the work of a business analyst is for those who are mostly “businessmen”, but at my core I am more of a “crafter”. But at that moment I did not realize it. My subconscious spoke to me with all sorts of wonderful dreams. I still remember one. I am in the middle of the desert, raking sand with my palms, and it flows between my fingers and is carried by the wind. You didn’t even have to read the interpretation of dreams to understand what it was about.

How did I learn programming? Read books and articles; watched tutorials; wrote the code; jumped up in the middle of the night when he suddenly understood something; went to shame at interviews; then he pestered his colleagues with stupid questions.

If you want to master it yourself, I highly recommend James Altucher’s article “How to Change Yourself: complete guide" There are 50 steps. Do everything in order. It’s about the same thing as what I listed, only with motivation: you will start doing something.

But I wouldn’t say that I switched from a humanities major to a techie. Nobody went anywhere because no one sent anyone. In general, it seems to me that the division between humanists and techies is a myth. The only difference between these groups seems to me to be the ability to operate with complex abstractions. But this does not contribute to a rational view of the world or less suggestibility. Among techies there are a lot of those who believe in myths (ancient, medieval, and also created modern history) and performs rituals, the meaning of which he does not understand, but does so because he has to. And among humanities scholars there are a lot of materialists with atheistic and nihilistic views.

However, there are definitely benefits from my liberal arts education. I had a case where it really helped. There was a Spanish Schengen visa in my passport, and upon arriving in Germany for the conference, they asked me why the hell I forgot from them if I was shopping at the Spanish embassy. To which I honestly said that I have a whole dissertation on the symbolism of the Third Reich, I want to see where everything happened, and then I’ll go to Barcelona to warm my bones. The passport officer widened his eyes, stamped his arrival, and didn’t ask anything else.

So, in small ways, a liberal arts education is also useful. Sometimes it helps to express thoughts. It makes it stand out among other “pogromists”: it’s great for the girls from HR to sit on their ears, it helps out at interviews. I regularly hear that interviewees are encountering such a talkative programmer for the first time. But you can learn this by sometimes reading something else besides technical literature.

The work is interesting to me. And so much so that after eight hours at work, I come home and spend another two or three hours doing something for myself. On weekends I watch lectures, read articles and write code, again for myself.

Moreover, when I can’t figure out how to do something (not all tasks real world fit well with formal logic), I go to bed and write code in my sleep.

Opinions of “physicists” and “lyricists” - about themselves and people

People with different types Thinking has always been divided into physicists and lyricists. Little has changed even now. It still seems to us that the first ones quickly calculate in their heads and try to explain everything around them from the point of view of the laws of science. And the latter may, out of the blue, start reciting poetry and correcting mistakes in love letters. Let's find out what representatives of both sides think about these differences.

Roman Sukhov, student of St. Petersburg State University of Aeronautics, Faculty of Computer Systems and Programming

— Techies have a more logical and practical approach to things. They imagine how most things in this world work, and this shapes the corresponding lines of thought. That is, they subconsciously look at any process, be it the process of selling buns in a canteen, buying tickets or issuing a foreign passport, as if it were some kind of system. Humanities scholars, in turn, have a more creative approach. And I think they're less likely to think about how things work.

Mikhail Ershov, student at Moscow State University, Faculty of Computational Mathematics and Cybernetics

— The most striking difference is that techies love to work with quantities and abstract matters. The tasks that are set before techies drive them into much stricter frameworks, while humanities scholars sometimes have almost no frameworks. And quantity right decisions humanitarian tasks are very large, and sometimes endless. I can also assume that techies look at things more practically, although it’s difficult to judge. There are different people everywhere.

Psychological approach

Olga Vladimirovna Shcherbakova, Ph.D. psychological sciences, Associate Professor, Lecturer at the Faculty of Psychology, St. Petersburg State University. Should high school students be divided into classes with in-depth study certain items? If a schoolchild easily solves physics problems, this does not mean that he is a technician. If a teenager draws and writes excellent essays, but does not cope well with the exact sciences, this does not mean that he is a humanist. This is a very formal division.

Olga Vladimirovna Shcherbakova, Candidate of Psychological Sciences, Associate Professor, Lecturer at the Faculty of Psychology of St. Petersburg State University (photographer: Mikhail Volkov)

— You know all these jokes: “It’s not a complete fool who says it, but a person with a humanitarian mindset.” This is, of course, not true. It’s just that some have the ability and desire to do one thing, while others have the opposite. And even the love of reading, so actively tied to the image of the “philological maiden,” is rather good habit, coming from family traditions. And the ability to clearly and beautifully express one’s thoughts is perhaps the most important inheritance that one can give to one’s children, and it is formed when they read bedtime stories to the child, discuss with him the events of the day, their feelings and emotions.

All people are different, and in this diversity, perhaps, lies the joy of communication.

It's hard to study

Who is it easier to study? It would seem that reading books and learning languages ​​is easier than writing computer code and studying nuclear physics. But this is only at first glance. Educational process is given faster and easier to those students and schoolchildren whom we are accustomed to calling technicians. Their advantage is that when studying technical sciences, to understand and memorize the material, they use methods based on generalizing the material, which they then systematize all incoming information. Even history is sometimes easier for techies to remember. They look at this field of knowledge as if from above, identifying logical connections, understanding the scale and inseparability of the events taking place. Technicians, by the way, having received an excellent base in technical universities, then quite calmly receive a second higher education in the humanities. But it is much more difficult for people in the humanities to become engineers later.

Useful Sartre

It is obvious that scientists in this world have made many more discoveries useful to humanity. But does that mean they are more important? “Who is more useful in this sense, Einstein or Kafka?” Olga Vladimirovna asks me a question to which there is no clear answer. No, perhaps Kafka is closer to me, but physics seems more useful to me. Their contribution is obvious and tangible, and there is no point in disputing it. At the same time, Maxwell and Popov, for most people, as well as for me, do not participate in the confrontation with Dostoevsky and Sartre. The lyricists gave no less to humanity, it’s just less noticeable in everyday life.

All these people are parts of one whole. And this whole is the present in which we live.

Someone in between

Meanwhile, there are those people who cannot be definitely called either physicists or lyricists. For example, people who are good at human emotions with the ability to empathize. They don't ask the person if anything happened because they sense someone else's grief or joy. “But doctors, for example, are closer to technicians or humanists?” I ask another question. It turns out that doctors are not some kind of intermediate type at all. On duty, they must be strong in the exact sciences, natural sciences, and humanities. With all this, they also need to feel people. In general, they are the real heroes of our time! Psychologists, as it turns out, are not exactly humanists either. Students of the Faculty of Psychology, for example, study long and hard mathematical statistics and they also think in interconnected chains, studying complex processes of the brain and body, such as nerve impulses.

God at the bottom of the glass

Do techies deny the presence of any higher powers considering them illogical? Olga Vladimirovna quotes one of the creators quantum mechanics, theoretical physicist Werner Carl Heisenberg. He owns the following phrase: “The first sip from the glass of natural science is taken by an atheist, but God awaits at the bottom of the glass.” The fact is that a person with a technical mind understands physical laws, studies space, the universe, the forces of the Earth and understands that science is not omnipotent and has its limits. Beyond these boundaries lies something that scientists cannot explain, something possibly related to religion.

But in fact, psychologists are convinced that the attitude towards mysticism or religion is not directly related to a person’s type of thinking. Both among humanists and among techies there are people with “magical” thinking, inclined to explain everything that happens with the help of magic, relying on signs, superstitions and magic. And here it doesn’t matter whether you are a lawyer, a poet, an athlete or a politician. A person can root for his favorite hockey team, wearing a dirty, unwashed T-shirt with his favorite player's number on it, just because he is sure that when he is on it, the team wins. So the actors sit behind the scenes on a new script, and the TV people never say “last broadcast,” otherwise you never know.

Institutes for Noble Maidens

I’m asking a question that, of course, interests me very much. Why are journalism and philology departments turning into institutes for noble maidens? Why do mathematics and physical technology departments attract young people so much more often? Psychologist draws a graph normal distribution. I note to myself that this is “a boa constrictor that swallowed an elephant” (we draw conclusions). So it turns out that in the place where the boa constrictor swelled the most, there are indicators of numerous girls with an average level of intelligence. These are the majority. The head and tail of a boa constrictor - a small number of brilliant women and women with low level intelligence accordingly. For men, the opposite is true. Among them there are few people with average abilities. They either hang around in the group of those lagging behind at school, going from bad to bad, or they find themselves among the best students, while participating in olympiads and playing chess. And such young people choose faculties from complex subjects which are given to them with ease when entering the best technical universities.

Girls enter humanities faculties, where studies are based on memorization, interpretation and forming their own opinions about what they have studied. According to the psychologist, we must also not forget that women are, after all, future mothers who will teach children to speak, think, develop imagination, interpret reality, and for this you need to be able to do this yourself. The humanities contribute greatly to this.

Two hemispheres of one whole

Much is said and written in Lately that there are left-hemisphere personalities, and vice versa - right-hemisphere ones. Some seem to be good at counting, building logical chains, formulating grammatically complex constructions, and generally being smarter than anyone else. People with a developed right hemisphere draw, sing, write poetry, and you can’t ask for more from them - creative personalities, what to take from them. In fact, earlier in psychology it was believed that the left hemisphere is responsible for movement, speech, logical thinking, complex computational operations and abstract thinking. The right one is for spatial movements, for example, that is, for things that are self-evident and imperceptible at first glance. “In fact, it seemed to people that a person needed the second hemisphere, the right, almost for symmetry, so that the head would not be outweighed.” Then scientists empirically realized, and still adhere to this, that there are no so-called right-hemisphere and left-hemisphere people. “For example, there are right-handers and left-handers.

This does not mean that one of their arms does not work. It’s just that paired organs in people are usually developed a little differently, says the psychologist, the leading arm, leg, and even the eye and ear. We use our dominant hand to write, use our foot to step off the escalator, use our eyes to aim when shooting, and use our ears to listen to a telephone conversation on the receiver. So it is with the hemispheres. Some people use the left a little more actively, others the right. In fact, when executing complex processes, both hemispheres always work in pairs.”

The conclusion is simple to the point of banality: even if you consider yourself to be a reader or a thinker, a physicist or a lyricist, a humanist or a techie, all this is largely a stereotype. After all, there are not even two people in the world who think alike!

We invite our readers to take a test to determine which sciences you are more inclined to - humanities or technical:

1. Are you interested in biographies of scientists?

- yes - 1 - no - 2

2. Do you enjoy understanding any drawings?

— no — 1 — yes — 2

3. What attracts you to poetry is the presence of complex metaphors and sophisticated language?

— no — 2 — yes — 1

4. You love puzzles and logic problems?

- yes - 2 - no - 1

— no — 1 — yes — 2

6. Can you always describe why you like this or that work of art?

- yes - 1 - no - 2

7. Have you often argued with teachers about literature, art, music?

— no — 2 — yes — 1

8. Do you like teachers who refuse to express their opinion on the subject and operate only with bare numbers and facts?

— no — 2 — yes — 1

9. How much can you tell about a person from his photograph?

— no — 2 — yes — 1

10. Do you enjoy understanding household appliances and how they work?

— no — 1 — yes — 2

11. When you meet a person, is it important for you to know their views on art?

— no — 2 — yes — 1

12. Do you like articles with tables and graphs in magazines and newspapers?

— no — 1 — yes — 2

13. Is it always possible to determine the exact price of any work of art?

— no — 1 — yes — 2

14. Do you think that it is easier to convince your interlocutor with specific numbers than with emotions?

- yes - 2 - no - 1

15. Do you agree that finding out the meaning of life is much more important than deciding some math problem?

— no — 2 — yes — 1

Key:

15-20 points. — most likely, you are a humanitarian. You are more interested in literature, philosophy, art and similar subjects. However, this does not mean that you are completely alien to the exact sciences. Perhaps you still have a long way to go in mastering mathematical disciplines.

21-25 points - you fluctuate between the humanities and exact sciences. You have a penchant for both. You can be envied: you unique person with universal inclinations. 26-30 points - most likely, you are more inclined towards technical disciplines. However, you shouldn't give up completely humanitarian sciences, if there is any interest in them. The more knowledge you have, the better.

There is probably no need to explain what “techie” or “humanitarian” means. Roughly speaking, this is a division into those who count and those who read.

The former are better oriented in the world of numbers and formulas, the latter prefer to reflect on literature, write essays and quickly master languages. Does this mean that humanities scholars are barred from entering mathematics and vice versa? Of course no. This division has nothing to do with psychology; it was invented by parents and teachers. Children themselves often pick up these labels. For what? Yes, at least to explain difficulties in mathematics or grammar. I'm bad at writing essays because I'm a techie. Very convenient, isn't it?

But the fact is that in the process of studying and growing up, many things in life change. What seemed not particularly interesting can suddenly be discovered in high school. In this case, shortcuts only get in the way.

Imagine that your winner of mathematics Olympiads and excellent student Petenka suddenly declares that he wants to become a historian or philologist. But how? He was always a “techie” and made twenty mistakes in dictations!

You just weren’t paying attention, it’s likely that at the same time your son was reading historical novels and scoured the Internet for facts about the War of the Roses. Did you think that your lovely Anechka would go to the Institute? foreign languages, and she, it turns out, wants to go to the Faculty of Computer Science.

The fact is that there are no pure techies or humanists.

If a person makes progress in mathematics, it means that he will be able to master other sciences, be it the exact sciences or the humanities.

Of course, the inclination towards one type of science is often greater than towards another. And yet interest can turn to reverse side. This, by the way, may be due to the developmental characteristics of the adolescent brain. It is uneven, one zone catches up with the other, so even if in the fifth grade a child was interested exclusively in mathematics, this does not mean that by the eleventh grade he will not switch to linguistics.

Narrowing the angle of view

The harm of the techie-humanitarian template is that the child begins to take a one-sided view of choosing a career. There are a huge number of professions in the world that are difficult to classify as exclusively technical or humanitarian. For example, a lawyer. On the one hand, he must thoughtfully read the case materials, communicate with the defendants, and write speeches for court hearings. Seems to be a humanitarian.

On the other hand, lawyers must have excellent logical thinking to solve a case or find arguments in favor of the defense and prosecution. And logic already belongs to the mathematical field. Where do creative professions belong? What about natural sciences? The more we limit a child’s perspective by classifying him as a clearly defined type, the narrower his professional choice becomes.

Moreover, often our children’s inability to do certain subjects directly depends on their understanding and interest. There may be several reasons. Perhaps you are unlucky with a teacher who explains the subject poorly and incomprehensibly. Maybe the child had some kind of illness important topic and missed the basics. He probably needed help with the simplest things so that he could more easily learn the complex ones.

And here a direct connection appears - if I don’t understand, it means I’m no longer interested.

In this case, attention switches to more understandable subjects, and others think that this is a typical humanist.

And the “humanitarian” simply pushed mathematics into a corner. Why pull her out of there, you ask. If the child has already delved into the humanities, maybe, okay, God bless her, with mathematics? Perhaps this will be so, but what if it is in the field of exact sciences that the child finds the profession of his dreams? You just need to give him a choice so that he understands exactly - this is mine and this is not. And without understanding, making a choice is not so easy.

What should a parent do?

The task of parents is to see the interests and abilities of the child and try to achieve their coincidence. It’s good if a child already knows from school what he wants to be, and even shows remarkable talent in the chosen subject. But, as practice shows, most often not everything is so ideal. There is interest, but no ability; there is ability, but no interest...

So what should we do?

If a child shows obvious talent in one of the areas (no matter - technical, humanitarian, natural science, creative), but at the same time he is bored, you need to take a closer look at the teachers. It may very well be that your talented young physicist cannot stand the boring Ivan Ivanovich, who monotonously drones on lesson after lesson without any desire to engage the class with the topic. Try to find interesting ones additional classes, efficient tutor. What if the child lights up and realizes that physics is his future?

If a student really wants to become, for example, a journalist, but has difficulty formulating thoughts, wait to enroll him as a technician and ruin his hopes. In this case, additional classes can also help. People do not immediately become professionals; this is achieved through many years of work and study. It is known that persistent desire and work made a man out of a monkey, and a man will definitely turn out to be a good specialist.

Life offers a person many paths, including professional ones. It’s better to get rid of templates and shortcuts and look at the possibilities more broadly. And feel free to choose what you like.