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Do Tech Firms Really Want Liberal Arts Majors?
Nerval's Lobster writes: Not too long ago, a Forbes writer declared that a liberal arts degree had "become tech's hottest ticket." At so-called 'disruptive juggernauts' such as Facebook and Uber, George Anders wrote, 'the war for talent' had moved into non-technical realms such as marketing and sales. While there's undoubtedly some truth to Anders's thesis, technology recruiters and executives aren't seeing any less demand for strong technical skills in a wide variety of roles (Dice link). When there's a need for tech professionals with 'soft skills,' at least one recruiter just recruits computer-science majors from liberal arts schools, figuring those recruits will be more 'well-rounded.' To be clear, Forbes doesn't suggest that IT employers have begun mixing liberal-arts graduates into their technical teams; the article talks more about those graduates ending up in supporting roles such as sales and marketing, or else becoming intermediaries who translate the customer's product requirements into engineering solutions. But nobody should think that a strong technical background isn't as valued as ever throughout tech companies.
Nor will they come in one morning with a shotgun and shoot the place up.
The worst mass shooting in US History was by an English major.
I'm a tech person who generally tries to avoid sales people as much as possible, but I'd never in a million years suggest that sales is a "supporting role". If it were not for the sales staff where I work, I'd have no income, and consequently be living in a van down by the river. The engineering staff knows how to do a lot of great stuff, but getting the foot in the door at a customer and then getting them to buy our product isn't one of them. There are other departments a company might be able to get by without, but sales isn't one of them.
Without a product, you can't sell anything.
Without a sales, you don't have income.
Without income, you can't pay the people who make the product.
(Repeat)
I would hire a gifted musician, painter, or journalist that shows the seed of understanding good design, over a humdrum programmer
False dichotomy. Sure a gifted musician may be better than a bad programmer. But why not hire a gifted programmer?
That's not a false dichotomy. A false dichotomy would be to say, "There are only gifted liberal arts majors and humdrum programmers." A gifted programmer would be wonderful, no doubt. Isn't that what I was saying a gifted artist might become?
What I was saying was, so important is a sense of design that it trumps college major, at least for entry-level programmer positions. Right now I'm looking for that PostgreSQL guy with 10 years of experience and a good sense of design, but . . . no dice.
What I keep running into, though, are programmers who can't program their way out of a paper bag, who would stare at me blankly if I quoted Brian Kernighan when he said "Controlling complexity is the essence of computer programming."
That sounds like the quality control at the college level is going down hill and there're a bunch of kids being run through a degree mill. While good programmers don't spring fully formed form the head of Zeus and there's probably loads of things that colleges should be teaching, but aren't, there are really only people who can learn to understand what is meant by that quote and people who just won't get it. The former can adapt to whatever problem you throw at them, but the latter are only good for what they're good for, but sometimes that's okay if that provides value.
Programming is a bit like math. You can probably teach everyone the basics and enough to get by or be dangerous, but the more advanced stuff requires a mind that can handle a lot of abstraction and the patience to digest the information and wrap one's mind around it. That's a limited number of people. I'm not sure if someone being a gifted writer or being able to paint aesthetically pleasing pictures would translate at all into good program design.
What I would hire those people for is requirement reviews. The type of people that tend to be really good at programming don't always think about the world the same way as a lot of other people. I'd want some fresh perspectives to go through the project's requirements, because odds are that they think differently about the world and will see the kinds of problems that programmers overlook. There's even some research (Sadly can't find a full text version not behind a paywall) to back this idea up.