One of the reasons I have returned to college for a more technical program is that I do not feel like explaining why people can trust a philosopher to take care of their computer needs any more. My experience with computers goes back to the 1970s when we all basically had to roll our own, both hardware and software, but I had never had any real formal paperwork like a degree or even a certificate to show that I knew what I was doing. While a lot of people will say that experience counts as much as a degree, eliminating candidates with experience but without degrees is always a great CYA strategy for hiring mangers. That, and the fact that philosophers have the reputation of bumbling “absent-minded professors,” never helped my case that I really did understand technology in general and computers in particular. But in reality, what the modern philosophy student learns is a great basis for an information management career. The emphasis on semantics and analysis in philosophical disciplines lays the groundwork for understanding the field. There are two particular areas where this is true.
The first thing is object oriented programming. The whole set of buzzwords like “objects” ,“instances” and “abstracting” are originally terms from metaphysics and, like metaphysics, the goal of object orientation is to model reality. The first question we deal with in metaphysics is, “what is real. An interesting point is that object oriented programming concepts are probably closer to the philosophical concept of formalism, in the term’s Platonic sense, than objectivism, but that would be a different topic. The bottom line is that a philosopher is probably better at understanding the underlying concepts which make up object orientation than anyone.
The second area where a philosophic background is a plus is systems analysis. If you examine an education in philosophy it is all about understanding systems. In the case of the philosopher the systems may be ethical or epistemological for instance but they are still systems. The job of breaking problems down to component parts and understanding how the parts come back together are the same no matter if you are trying to understand Kant or a customer relationship management (CRM) system. Philosophers spend a great deal of their time honing their analytic skills by being criticized by other philosophers evaluating their work. They learn to identify assumptions, clarify terms and look for systemic flaws, all skills used by a business analyst developing a solution. The first class I took as a philosopher was logic and that logic gets applied to business problems as well as philosophical ones.