Communications of the ACM
Silicon Valley Needs Humanities Students
Sam Madden, an associate professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT and co-leader of the bigdata@CSAIL initiative.
Credit: Jason Dorfman/CSAIL
At a time when technology companies place the greatest value on hires with STEM backgrounds and venture capitalists prefer to back companies started by engineers, what is the relative value of a humanities degree? The answer may be surprising. According to a recent survey of U.S.-born CEOs and heads of product engineering that was conducted by Duke and Harvard, only 37% held degrees in engineering or computer technology, and just 2% had a degree in mathematics. The rest have degrees in fields as diverse as business, accounting, finance, healthcare, arts and the humanities. The findings suggest that a bachelor's degree — combined with a passion to change the world and the confidence to defy the odds and succeed — are the most important traits of today's tech workers.
Humanities majors sometimes make the best project managers, the best product managers, and, ultimately, the most visionary technology leaders because they do not get wrapped up as technologists can in features that are useless for most people. Humanities majors can more easily focus on people and how they interact with technology. Even for people with strong tech backgrounds in fields such as artificial intelligence, going back to school for an advanced degree in the humanities can lead to a transformational shift that opens their eyes not only to key foundational arguments and theories. It can also lead to improved capabilities in strategic vision, creative problem solving, and other critical traits.
Of course, the world needs engineers. The technology sector, though, needs musicians, artists, and psychologists, as much as it needs biomedical engineers and computer programmers. For tech entrepreneurs and managers, there is no "right" major or field of study. While having a degree in a STEM discipline may present a short-term advantage at startup time, it may comprise an equally important disadvantage if the degree came at the cost of other critical "soft leadership" skills required to focus, lead, and grow companies.
From The Washington Post
View Full Article
No entries found