Letters to the Blog #1: Understanding the Tech Industry for a Non-STEM Major

I recently received an email from a self-identified "non-STEM major" who seemed to want to know how they could learn about some combination of tech, the tech industry, and finance. I am reproducing my response here as others may find it informative.

Hi [REDACTED],

I'm a little unclear on what your goals are from your email.

If you are trying to learn how to program I would probably still recommend learning the old fashioned way without AI (and then using AI once you have strong foundational knowledge). I don't have any strong recommendations, but https://automatetheboringstuff.com/ might be a reasonable start.

If you are trying to understand business, I read "The Personal MBA" and it seemed like a decent introduction. Peter Thiel's book on tech startups "Zero to One" is influential, although I haven't read it.

If you are interested in finance as in doing financial modeling at a bank/quant firm, I am probably not the person to ask. If you are interested in finance as in trying to beat index funds as an individual via some sort of trading strategy I would give up on that goal.

If you are simply trying to understand the current state of the tech industry your approach of keeping up with daily news is reasonable (you may want to consider an aggregator such as https://www.techmeme.com). I would recommend Zvi's blog (https://thezvi.substack.com/) if you are interested in keeping up with AI in particular.

For any topic my preference is for written material over video tutorials as I generally find them to be of higher quality. Claude can probably give you decent book recommendations if you try to explain to it what you want. If you prefer video I would recommend looking for publicly available lectures from professors at respectable universities.

Hope this is useful,
Ben Friedl