From WaPo’s Answer Sheet:
In 2013, Google decided to test its hiring hypothesis [of hiring only technologists] by crunching every bit and byte of hiring, firing, and promotion data accumulated since the company’s incorporation in 1998. Project Oxygen shocked everyone by concluding that, among the eight most important qualities of Google’s top employees, STEM expertise comes in dead last. The seven top characteristics of success at Google are all soft skills: being a good coach; communicating and listening well; possessing insights into others (including others different values and points of view); having empathy toward and being supportive of one’s colleagues; being a good critical thinker and problem solver; and being able to make connections across complex ideas.
Those traits sound more like what one gains as an English or theater major than as a programmer. Could it be that top Google employees were succeeding despitetheir technical training, not because of it? After bringing in anthropologists and ethnographers to dive even deeper into the data, the company enlarged its previous hiring practices to include humanities majors, artists, and even the MBAs that, initially, [Google founders] Brin and Page viewed with disdain.
Emphasis mine. I suppose as a software engineer I should be horrified. But I don’t know that I was ever a technologist, whatever that might be. Coming out of high school, I thought I wanted to be a novelist someday, but I knew I wasn’t ready for that and didn’t really believe you could train to be one, so I found a forward looking career and took a shot at it. Fortunately, writing code tends to agree with my temperament – and it let me be lazy as well.
I wonder how much influence this study will have on industry and education. For years the soft sciences having been getting short schrift from everyone, from technology students to the educational institutions themselves. Perhaps this will mark the end of a pendulum swing and now it’ll start to swing back to accepting there’s value in those hills as well, as they’ve constantly argued themselves (talking hills? Must be Christmas morning around here). And, in turn, this will make the those educational institutions stronger, rather than turning them into simply a skills-development academy.
I wonder if the University of North Carolina is listening.
