
What the Head of Hiring at Google Doesn’t Understand About Skills - ilamont
http://chronicle.com/blogs/conversation/2014/05/28/what-the-head-of-hiring-at-google-doesnt-understand-about-skills/?cid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en
======
jzwinck
This article is ridiculous. While there are certain areas (e.g. pattern
matching) where a typical English major is likely to do well, rigorous logical
thinking of the sort needed when we program computers is simply not developed
as well as it is in CS, EE, and various other programs.

As a third-year undergrad I took a 400-level course on logic from the
humanities department. I remember being blown away by how inept the average
students there seemed at first. They were simply unprepared for the torrent of
proofs, deductions, tautologies, De Morgan's laws, etc. The way of thinking
required to get through that class easily was one which most second-year CS
students had, but not the student body at large. I came to realize I had been
groomed for this class for years already.

In a 200-level CS course we learned to use Karnaugh Maps. This was not
optional. There is a difference between analyzing digital logic and writing
papers outside CS. Not that one is better than the other, but you don't hear
CS folks claiming they're well suited for writing poetry.

~~~
williamcotton
> They were simply unprepared for the torrent of proofs, deductions,
> tautologies, De Morgan's laws, etc.

All of which I never see used in a professional capacity for the vast majority
of software developers.

What I do see used quite often is the ability to communicate to customers or
other engineers in a clear, succinct and enjoyable manner using the English
language.

~~~
radmuzom
Technical people often underestimate the value of good communication.
Technical does not necessarily refer to programming, but also to other fields
like statistical financial modelling (which I do). And complain about the fact
that people less qualified than them are in management. I'm not suggesting
that communication should be the sole criteria for management - a lot of
software companies need programmers at the helm (as advocated by Joel
Spolsky), but there are situations where an analytical liberal arts major with
maturity and leadership skills will do much better than someone whose primary
skills is technology.

~~~
smtddr
_> >Technical people often underestimate the value of good communication._

Not just underestimate, even outright condemn. Like the people who defend
Linus's form of _" communication"_ on the kernel mailing list as _" to the
point"_ or _" efficient"_. Anyone who thinks that's an acceptable style of
communication from/to any human being is wrong and a perfect example of why
the tech companies in general should probably make their engineers attend a
speech and/or social relationships class. Somewhere along the line, _"
engineering culture"_ decided any communication protocols outside of TCP, UDP
and syscalls are a waste of time.

~~~
philwelch
Linus excels at communication. He makes it crystal clear what he's trying to
convey and the standard he's setting, and has coordinated the development of
the most widely-deployed kernel on earth entirely via email for decades. He
communicates perfectly well.

He's an asshole on occasion, but that's not the same as communicating poorly.

~~~
smtddr
Completely disagree. I don't care how popular his kernel is; his communication
style is ridiculous and the fact that there are so many devs that have no
problem working for him isn't a sign that his communication is good.... it's a
sign all the people working with him don't realize, or ignore, or accept his
ridiculous behavior and is just an example of why the tech industry needs a
communications/social relations course for a lot of engineers.

~~~
philwelch
Are you judging by results or by your own subjective taste? Because I find
results more interesting (and persuasive).

~~~
smtddr
Even if maximum efficiency is achieved by his style of communication, I still
don't agree with it. Efficiency is not more important than being civil.

 _" Ends don't justify the means"_ kinda thing... but I know I'm not going to
convince you in this thread; and you're definitely not going to convince me
otherwise. There are too many rude people in tech that don't know how to
communicate properly with people. Rudeness has somehow become acceptable in
the tech-industry so they can't see the problem they have.... and it __is__ a
problem.

~~~
philwelch
I'm trying to draw a distinction between effective communication and not being
an asshole. They are different problems. One is a problem of ability and the
other is a problem of temperament.

Conversely to Linus, someone can be perfectly polite and pleasant but fail to
communicate effectively because they don't convey any meaningful information.
Such a person would have poor communication skills, but not be an asshole.
Linus has good communication skills, but is an asshole.

------
joelgrus
It's not that you _can 't_ learn rigor and critical thinking skills as an
English major, it's that it's not all that hard to complete an English degree
without learning those things. Hence the word "signals".

~~~
YarnBall
As former English literature and philosophy student (I am studying computer
science while working for a startup now) I can tell you at that at my
university you would not get an A if your reasoning and critical analysis were
poor. When I was studying it was not uncommon for STEM students to get 100%
for tests and exams but such a thing was unheard of in the humanities faculty.
If an undergraduate got 100% for an English essay that essay would be worthy
of publication in a literary journal which only happened once while I was
there.

~~~
nhebb
As the time of me writing this, it looks like you're being downvoted (which I
don't think is fair), but I think your answer points to one of the problems.
Grading in the humanities is more subjective. By analogy, Olympic gymnastic
scores are subject to a lot more disagreements than 100 meter sprint times.

~~~
YarnBall
Let them downvote me: let them bring their slings and arrows! :) I can't argue
against what you have said. The humanities are subjective but that does not
mean that they are not valuable but the greater problem is that there is very
little demand in the global economy for essays on social contract theory and
Tolkien's Lord of the Rings and anti-industrialism. The best thing we can hope
for is that the humanities plays a complimentary role in education. i.e.
studying a humanities major like philosophy in addition to a computer science
degree. In my "subjective experience" when building consumer facing apps for
my company having a humanities degree has helped to make these apps better.
Being able to code well is not a guarantee that your app will appeal to a
consumer but knowing what people want in a product for instance, is an
enterprise for the humanities because it demands introspection, divergent and
subjective thinking which is a different kind of thinking altogether. That is
why I am irked when people from the sciences dismiss the humanities too
readily because the humanities does have something to give to the world. In
short, tech + humanities = better products/ideas.

~~~
nhebb
I agree with you. I think the humanities are important not only for what they
teach, but also in that they attract people with a different view of the world
(and way of thinking, perhaps) than is common in the sciences. From the
perspective of the Google hiring manager, though, filtering based on degree
type is probably one of the easiest cuts to make when you're operating at that
scale.

------
jerf
Of course you can teach a rigorous English course.

The problem is that you can also not.

I took an intro to philosophy course in which we were graded reasonably
rigorously on our logic. But the prof also made it clear via both a bit of
text and a bit of subtext that we were getting so graded because nobody really
takes the old stuff that seriously anyhow, so there's no sacred oxes getting
gored. You can write an essay for this class either endorsing or denouncing
Descartes and as long as it is reasonably logical, you'll get a good grade.
Don't expect such accommodations if you start getting into what is taken
seriously.

I also took a real-deal English history class graded primarily on essays, and
both at the time and even now I'm pretty sure I got a 2.5 simply because I
failed to correctly echo back what the prof expected, made harder by the fact
that she did a reasonably good job of not _telegraphing_ what she expected.
However, I never got any _other_ useful feedback on my essays; the facts were
correct, the arguments were logical enough, they were to the expected length,
they just got graded poorly. (And it's not as if I was going out of my way to
write offensive political agitprop myself, I was just trying to answer the
questions. But I'm quite sure my perspective was quite different than hers, in
ways hard to explain in an HN comment.)

The fact that _you_ run a rigorous course grading logic and rhetoric (based on
a computer science degree) is not proof that everybody else does. Yes, they
all _say_ that's what they do, but that's not proof either. In practice the
humanities are pretty notorious for this sort of thing, and I'm completely
unconvinced this essay with its one data point that is almost by definition an
outlier (both coming from a computer science degree and being what is probably
an early course in the sequence as implied by having a lot of non-English
majors in it) provides any significant evidence against the original claims
from Google, or that the field's notoriety is unearned in practice.

(Incidentally, to the extent that I rather dislike the humanities we have
today, it is precisely that they _could_ be excellent training in logic and
rhetoric, but they generally aren't. Postmodernism poisoned the humanities
nearly unto destruction.)

~~~
Spooky23
Your position can apply to anything. There are Computer Science graduates who
cannot tell you what a linked list is.

You need to look for signals that imply humanities majors that are smart. Do
they have published articles in student publications? Were they active in
campus organizations?

End of the day, look for smart people who get things done.

If you need specific, rigorous domain expertise, hire somebody with a degree
in that discipline of engineering or whatever. Otherwise, you're better off
with a smart person who knows how to think and communicate vs. someone with an
engineering degree who cannot function.

~~~
jerf
"If you need specific, rigorous domain expertise, hire somebody with a degree
in that discipline of engineering or whatever. Otherwise, you're better off
with a smart person who knows how to think and communicate vs. someone with an
engineering degree who cannot function."

This is one of those cases where it sounds like you think you disagree, yet
you just gave away the farm there. If you want a programmer, hire one trained
in programming, you just agreed. As for whether you hire the functioning
English major or the non-functional computer science major for a programming
job, in practice, you hire neither.

As for it "applying to everything", actually, my last paragraph is a
parenthetical because I don't feel like justifying it deeply in an HN post
when it would properly take a book, but there is a difference. Postmodernism
killed the humanities. Evicting the entire idea of "truth" and calling that
eviction virtue murders all further academic thought. (Yes, I'm summarizing.
Brutally. But that is more true than it is false.) Even if that is true, it's
still not an epistemological framework under which any academic function can
take place. Computer science doesn't have that problem, all the moreso because
the compiler grounds almost the entire discipline; certainly everything an
undergraduate will encounter. It's hard for the humanities to brag about their
ability to inculcate logical thought and careful rational reasoning when at
the highest levels those things are despised.

------
digitalsushi
I feel bad that I cant get a job at the New York Times with my cs degree. I
might not know any literary composition or journalism techniques, but you
can't tell me that as a computer scientist I am not as smart as an english
major that learned all these skills in college.

Ok. Now we both feel inadequate and offended, so it's all even.

~~~
drivingmenuts
Drama major here.

I can look or sound competent in any field.

Well, except Drama, but it's not like there's any money to be had there.

------
gexla
> In “Dante’s Hell and Its Afterlife,” an undergraduate course I teach at my
> university, students have to work hard to achieve good results (not to
> mention an A-level grade) on a research essay. The “excellent” paper will
> contain a substantive thesis that is appropriately focused, coherent, and
> interpretive, not merely descriptive; a detailed analysis of well-chosen
> examples to support the argument; a logical ordering of parts, each
> contributing to the whole, with transitions and topic sentences that advance
> and crystallize the main points; an effective use of information from
> credible sources, correctly cited and documented; and all expressed in
> clear, concise, grammatically correct prose.

So true. Writing is highly technical and very difficult. Just before I started
at my state university, it added a writing test that all students had to pass
before receiving a degree because employers complained about the lack of
writing skills. Several years in, most people were still failing on their
first try.

Unfortunately, writing doesn't have debugging tools, tests and output for
feedback to let you know if what you put together works. Rather, you need
someone who is a good writer to provide honest feedback.

Also difficult is that developing good writing skills requires good
instructors / mentors. I have had too many writing classes with instructors
who would give praise for just about anything. All of my instructors in my
first year of taking writing classes told me how great I was. It wasn't until
I took a technical writing class in which my first paper came back a mess of
red ink that I finally felt like I was learning something. That class was one
of the most valuable I have ever taken. She told us at the beginning of the
class that few people can write well, we probably won't ever be able to write
well either (true for me,) but she would help us become passable enough to get
through the writing test.

Granted, most writing classes don't focus on the same items as technical
writing. But with as much effort as this instructor put into every one of my
papers, this can't be something many instructors are willing to do.

How do you become a good writer and get good feedback? I don't know.

Compare this to many other classes in which the instructor is largely a guide
and you do most or all of your learning on your own.

ETA: I think the instructor and the quality of the course is extremely
important. Many subjects in college can be setup to be easy to coast through
or rigorous. The name on the course isn't as important as the contents.

~~~
scarecrowbob
"How do you become a good writer and get good feedback? I don't know."

Write a lot and have other people read it.

Try and communicate, and see where that communication breaks down.

Write for large audiences, and see where you are either misunderstood or how
you piss of the readers.

These recommendations are some of the tools you're asking for, though they
aren't as automated or have answers as clear as piping something to a standard
output.

Remember, when you first start to learn programming, you don't have access to
"debugging tools, tests and output for feedback", either... these are tools
you develop because you realize that you need them. That doesn't mean that
these tools don't exist, or that you can't find them, or that they are useful
to you in your situation.

------
VikingCoder
@joelgrus really nailed it. When someone at Google uses the verb "signals,"
you need to pay attention. Nothing is black and white in search. It's entirely
about pulling together multiple sources of information, and deciding which
ones signal the strongest and correlate with the results you're looking for.

Guy Raffa is welcome to make his own search engine company staffed entirely
with English majors to prove his point.

~~~
Iftheshoefits
Disagreeable or not, I find it amusing that he opens his piece with a rubric
regarding what constitutes an "excellent" paper in his course, and your last
sentence contains such a glaring fallacy that it seems entirely likely he'd
dock you heavily for it (and rightly so). It's also incredibly ironic
considering the context of the argument at hand.

~~~
VikingCoder
> It sounds like he wants those topflight English majors after all: graduates
> adept at conceiving, articulating, and supporting their own ideas—not some
> “specific answer” the professor is looking for. Bock just doesn’t realize
> they are what he is looking for.

Guy Raffa goes so far as to claim that those topflight English majors are what
Bock is looking for.

If that were true, then a team built on this core principal should clearly be
better than one built without it.

If you see a fallacy in the last sentence of my first post, please explain it
to me. Calling something a fallacy is your thesis. Now it is your job to prove
it. Irony, indeed.

~~~
Iftheshoefits
Nowhere does Raffa claim that a team built entirely of English majors would be
better than one built of any other constituency. That's a strawman you
erected. QED.

~~~
VikingCoder
Raffa says, "they [topflight English majors] are what he is looking for."
Topflight English majors are the constituency Raffa says Bock should hire. You
have to purposefully misread what Raffa has written, in order to see it any
other way.

------
ThrustVectoring
"Guess the teacher's password" is a strategy that works for many English
majors and few Computer Science majors. You can succeed at rhetoric by either
learning how to make good rhetoric, or by learning how to tell people what
they want to hear.

It's significantly more difficult to write good programs by learning how to
tell people what they want to hear.

~~~
michaelochurch
There are English professors who are legitimately hard to game, people who are
smarter than most or all of us but have chosen to focus on something
different. Yes, there's more noise in the system in the humanities, but don't
underestimate them just because they have a different skill set.

However, the game-the-system students generally avoid those professors, who
get a reputation for being difficult graders. So your point has validity. I
just object to the idea that _all_ humanities professors can be "hacked". Yes,
there are some who grade highly any students who confirm their biases, but
quite a few of them are smarter than any of us.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
Yeah but in CS, the program works or it doesn't. So there's none of that
wiggle room. CS degree definitely signals something - a minimum competency
that is uncertain in a humanities student.

~~~
dragonwriter
> Yeah but in CS, the program works or it doesn't. So there's none of that
> wiggle room.

CS grading is not the same thing as just programs working (and often that's
not even the most important part of it), and, in my (obviously limited and
potentially not representative, I'll admit, but there's not a lot of
structured evidence being presented on any side here), the variability between
institutions and individual classes within institutions in CS grading is more
alike than distinct from that in any other field.

The scope of the curriculum, OTOH, in CS is probably more consistent between
institutions and individual students within institutions than is the case in
most non-technical fields, _particularly_ for CS taught within an engineering
rather than liberal arts institution (e.g., at UC Davis, the difference
between a degree from the College of Engineering and the College of Letters
and Science), and, further, while there are certainly kinds of analytical
skills that are central to most courses of study in English, its not at all
unreasonable to expect that the _kind_ of analytical skills that Google is
more concerned about are more likely to be central in CS programs.

But, overall, I think people are generally overplaying this. The stated
preference for CS over other degree fields even with a slightly higher GPA in
the non-CS field isn't anything like an absolute bar. Its saying that a degree
in CS is one signal that is relevant to the Google hiring director that has
some weight, not that it overwhelms all other information.

As an aside, though, it _is_ worth _Google_ examining whether this signal is
given more weight than it should, especially considering their recently-posted
diversity numbers and their stated concern for diversity -- since their
overall diversity matches fairly well the diversity of CS graduates but
clearly doesn't meet what they want, they might want to consider whether part
of their diversity problem is overemphasizing having a degree in CS in their
recruitment material and selection processes. If it is overweighted -- and I'm
not saying that it is -- that would be a _lot_ easier for Google to fix than
many of the other things they are trying to do to address diversity (not that
those things aren't valuable to pursue _even if_ addressing the weighting of
CS degrees can address some of the problem more easily and in a shorter time
frame.)

Full disclosure: I am programmer whose only degree is in Political Science.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
Your last line is telling. I know Many programmers who have no CS degree, or
no degree at all. They are some of the best.

SO clearly a CS degree as a bar is going to miss an important demographic
(potential hiring population). But a CS bar is also clearly useful in an
effort to weed out inappropriate hires (vs one that filters for hiring the
best).

~~~
dragonwriter
But note that the preference that Google's hiring director has stated _is not
a bar_ \-- there is a difference between a positive signal and a _sine qua
non_ litmus test.

------
frogpelt
So one of the very few English professors in the country with a computer
science degree is offended by Google's hiring practices.

The fact is most English majors don't enjoy heavy duty math or science as much
and it's not that weird to expect a computer science major to depend more on
logic and rigor when approaching a problem than it is for someone whose thesis
was devoted to a literary analysis of the symbolism behind the pickle dish in
Ethan Frome.

~~~
kennymeyers
"The fact is most English majors don't enjoy heavy duty math or science as
much"

These statements need data to back them up, Mr. Science.

~~~
learc83
You don't think it's a given that, on average, students who choose a degree
that requires "heavy duty math" enjoy it more than students who choose a
degree that doesn't require "heavy duty math"?

~~~
kennymeyers
I'm unsure of the motivations most people have in choosing majors. When I see
generalizations of a very large group of people, no matter how obvious it may
seem, I just like to see data to back it up.

------
vittore
First comment to the article by @skeptomycin sums up entire article. Not worth
the time to read it really.

>>I cannot believe how the actual statements by Bock were distorted and taken
out of context by Prof. Raffa. It is beyond appalling.

------
Strilanc
I think of English courses as teaching you about being _convincing to humans_.
Correctness is important, but _secondary_. This is probably best exemplified
by anecdotes being arguably the most evocative form of explanation, and yet
the weakest form of evidence.

It makes sense to me that a technology company would downweight achievements
in the humanities when hiring (for their technical positions). It's a noisier
signal. Computers and nature aren't convinced or understood in the same way as
humans are, so a lot of the English major benefits get lost in the translation
to STEM.

(Serious question: what are the best examples of people in the humanities
contributing to science and technology? For example, Noam Chomsky basically
invented formal grammars.)

------
qwerta
I think most humanity studies develop critical thinking, but at very shallow
level.

Mathematicians have to nest 100s levels of logical operations to get proof
they want. Programming around 50 to 10 logical operations. Lawyers perhaps 10.
Literature nests perhaps 5 levels of logical operations.

There is simply no apparatus to manage this level of complexity in human
language. Just try to describe 3th level integral or matrix operations with
pure words. It is like analyzing complex program on TI programmable calculator
with 5 line display.

And I think English is not very logic friendly language, too many double
meanings and context sensitivity. I like German for its logic and Esperanto
for its simplicity.

------
thathonkey
A quality education is a quality education. I'm sure he takes into
consideration more than just the major and letter grade achieved though
(obviously getting a B avg in MIT's CS program would not be the same as
getting an A avg in Auburn's).

Anyway I'm of the opinion that it doesn't really matter what someone's
academic focus is. Smart, impassioned people can excel at any field that they
take the time to become educated in. Not to mention that programming and
computer engineering is much more about experience than we'd like to admit.

~~~
nomadlogic
+1 from the systems engineer with over a decade experienceat cutting edge
facilities - and a BA in philosophy (focused on recent continental thought,
not logic). It comes down to the individual and their passion.

------
klunger
I have one humanities degree (Japanese Studies) and one STEM degree (Aerospace
Engineering), both from good schools in those respective domains. So, I feel
in a unique position to comment on this.

I enrolled in the engineering program second, after I was sick of the poor
employment opportunities associated with the first degree. During my
engineering studies, it sometimes felt like my brain was being rewired, making
it more suited to meet the rigors of the coursework.

I don't know if this was "in my head" or if something was actually happening
on a neurological level. But, I know that the course work went from being
ridiculously challenging in my first semester (pulled teeth to get B's and C's
in the early days) to manageable and often fun in the last (mostly A's).

I am eternally grateful to the research and writing skills that I honed during
my first degree. However, it was definitely the engineering courses that made
me into the "analytical thinker" I am today. So, I think there is something to
be said about what a STEM degree signals.

------
agorabinary
I used to be a philosophy major at a top 10 school notorious for its rigor.
Now I am a CS major at my local university after transferring (for various
reasons including cost). What the author doesn't understand is that when we
says, "It sounds like he wants those topflight English majors after all:
graduates adept at conceiving, articulating, and supporting their own
ideas—not some “specific answer” the professor is looking for", you actually
get much more creative solutions to CS problems because implementations may
vary, but are still bounded by the problem. In English (and potentially moreso
in philosophy), you are not really bounded by anything, so it's incredibly
easy to get at least a "good" grade, while getting an A is entirely at the
mercy of a subjective grader with no clear grading rubric to distinguish a B+
from an A. Further, there isn't any domain to learn, so you can fairly easily
skim the cliffnotes of every assigned reading and produce at least a B essay.
Thus, no work ethic. CS really forces you into a discipline because there is a
domain to learn as well as projects to code, and you can't BS a program at the
last minute. If an essay doesn't have a coherent conclusion at 4am, turn it in
and get a B. But if your program doesn't compile at 4am...

From my experience I consider CS to be far more challenging in terms of
critical thinking, work ethic, and ability to solve complex problems. Also
interesting is the camaraderie the students in these classes develop as we
solve hard problems together, with the knowledge that if you've made it this
far in the major, you're pretty capable. To echo the sentiment of another
poster, you would be pretty blown away be the ineptitude of many liberal arts
majors (apart from their complete lack of relevant domain knowledge) who are
able to cruise through their classes for all the reasons mentioned above.

~~~
methodover
> while getting an A is entirely at the mercy of a subjective grader with no
> clear grading rubric to distinguish a B+ from an A

Huh? This is true in programming too. Getting something to compile can't be
all CS professors are looking for, right?

Programming is more about communication than anything else. You can write
something a hundred different ways which will all run more or less fine -- but
they all won't be equally readable and maintainable.

I didn't get a CS degree, so I don't have experience on the matter. Do CS
professors grade for readability at all?

~~~
agorabinary
CS professors do grade for clarity and not just "does it work/compile?" but as
a matter of relative weight in a grading distribution I think it gets less
attention, and necessarily so for the more challenging problems. Writing
prompts have a simpler objective domain to test (grammar, word usage) so the
bulk of the grade weight goes to interpretation and style, which is of course
subjective.

------
tragic
To be instrumental about it, English (and the arts/humanities subjects in
general) teaches the skill of decision making under conditions of uncertainty:
we are required to make inferences on the basis of ambiguous 'data' (a
literary text whose meaning will generally be slippery) and competing bodies
of theory which cannot be proven against each other, of sufficient solidity
that they can be defended in a logically coherent argument.

This is a real skill. And if you actually _apply_ yourself to an arts degree,
it does develop it. (Before the emergence of national literature studies and
modern historiography, the study of the Classics played this role, broadly
speaking.)

It does not have direct relevance to software engineering at all (speaking as
someone with two literature degrees). But not all problems in development are
strictly technical. Someone down there said:

> Yeah but in CS, the program works or it doesn't.

Indeed. Google+ works, right?

------
zacinbusiness
I was an English major in undergrad and grad school and I see these arguments
all the time. I learned a great deal in my university career, and much of what
I learned in the humanities took real intellectual curiosity, hard work, and
deep thinking. You're not going to put together a real, publishable work by
copy and pasting work from Stackoverflow, not in a master level English
course. And let's be honest, the majority of CS students are lazy and
incompetent, just like the majority of all students in all majors. Sure, you
get some truly brilliant students that come along, but most of them never
really produce anything of value. And most engineers, talented as they may be
at slinging code and doing the lambda calculus, are pitiful communicators and
can barely write a coherent sentence.

~~~
zacinbusiness
Let's see some logical refutations before we start with the emotional down
votes, you purely logical genius gods of knowledge.

~~~
Iftheshoefits
I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for that, were I you.

My education is in science. My particular science is one in which I had to
learn a lot of mathematics--everything from real analysis to quite advanced
analytical geometry and a wide variety of other things. I forgot more math by
the time I took my qualifying exams than most CS people I've known ever
learned. So for my part it's just hilarious to see the unbridled arrogance
showing its head here. CS majors like to think of themselves as being paragons
of logical and intellectual rigor. I think the downvotes we've accumulated
here shows that some, at least, ought not.

That's not to excuse or defend the author of the article. I happen to agree
with the argument he claims the Googler makes (even though the Googler doesn't
apparently actually make that argument) in a very broad sense, based solely on
my personal experiences. It's a sense broad enough that it ought not be
applied to individuals.

------
andyidsinga
Ha! Last developer I hired was an English major ...I found out after I hired
him ... the degree question didn't come up in three interview process ... just
programming.

------
sharemywin
Your obviously missing the point he was trying to make. No one was saying that
an english major can't make a well thought out argument with a valid point. In
fact they can probably do it better than a computer scientist. But, that's not
what programming is. Programming is taking the simplest thing and elaborting
in mind numbing detail for the computer to execute. way past the point most
people get bored and give up. Take a simple form first name great how many
characters should we store. middle name same question address how many lines?
should we break it out into number and street name? what about suites? State
great..list them out... all of them. city..ok..find a database of the cities
and tie them to zip code. Oh wait...this is an international ap..great..let's
start over...ok now three screens back if they selected this option change the
font to one size larger. Programming isn't about making an argument it's
closer to mapping out all the arguments and figuring out how they all fit
together. but usually for topics that people wouldn't waste their time arguing
over. like how to fill out an insurance form. or which document to pick first
from a list.

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mbubb
What I am saying here is anecdotal (but when did that ever stop anyone)...

I have to agree with Bock.

I was an English major at a solid school (Rutgers) and went on to do some grad
work in Comp Lit at NYU. Years later I took CS/ Math classes at Stevens -
there is no comparison in the difficulty. The only exception were the
political theory classes I took which were grounded in Hegel - they were hard.

I have met 10 times as many Science / Tech people who were relatively well
versed in Literature and/or Art than the contrary. There tends to be absolute
illiteracy in Math and hard Science in the Humanities.

I remember years ago one of my profs got caught up in an embarrassing incident
where a faked article which conflated Relativism and Relativity passed muster
at a critical theory journal and was published with glaring scientific errors.
(The Sokal Affair)

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair)

Now that i am in a tech field I wish I had spent more time studying math
instead of so much Englsh and Political Theory as an undergrad.

------
svmegatron
Bock and the author both miss the same point: the thing that helps you learn
to think in a rigorous way is to study something that does _not_ come
naturally to you.

I see it as the difference between learning a new skill and practicing an
existing one. The former forces you to focus completely, while the latter
tolerates inattention.

------
timdierks
Doing well in an English major at a good school is hard work, requires strong
critical thinking skills, etc. But it doesn't reflect the level of analytical
precision and rigorous correctness that doing well as a CS major does.

The humanities as a course of study are primarily interpretive and creative,
and most schools of thought will support the idea that many different
interpretations have value.

By comparison, while there are many different approaches and creative and
engineering opportunities in CS, in the end the computer Does Exactly What It
Is Told To Do And Nothing Else. And the level of precision, exactness and
rigor necessary to support that environment is alien to most humanities
curricula.

------
TheMagicHorsey
Its like the author of this article never compared an English major to a CS
major. Yeah, I'm sure the top 1% of English majors are pretty smart guys, but
on average they are not very good at thinking logically. And yes, the bottom
25% of CS graduates are probably not that good either.

But the fact remains, if you take a top 25% CS graduate from almost any
program in the world, that guy can probably understand a business case quicker
than a top 25% English major from an equivalent institution.

Its just far easier to get a humanities degree than it is to get a CS degree,
if you aren't a structured thinker to begin with.

~~~
fancyketchup
That's sort of a straw man, though, isn't it? The Google guy said he'd take a
B-level CS major over an A-level humanities major. So you're not comparing
top-25% CS to top-25% humanities. You're comparing second quartile (roughly)
CS to top quartile (again, roughly) humanities.

Now, I'm a just physicist with no skin in the game, but it seems to me that
arguments on HN in support of the Google position (and yours in particular)
all try to argue that CS is generically "harder," or that it's easier to
graduate with a humanities degree, or that the xth percentile CS major is
smarter than the xth percentile humanities major.

So far I haven't really seen anyone address the assertion that graduating with
an A-average in a humanities major is very difficult. Maybe it really _is_
easy to get a BA in humanities with a 2.0 GPA (I don't know, but it sounds
plausible). But that's not the issue. The issue is how a 3.5ish GPA humanities
major compares to a 2.5ish CS major.

------
sanjiwatsuki
Some of the inflammatory statements have been taken out of context. The B vs.
A+ quote was used in the context of students changing majors due to difficulty
-- i.e. changing from a CS+English double major to Economics due to the
difficulty of the double major. It is a discussion of the phenomenon described
by "Students Pick Easier Majors Despite Less Pay." written in the WSJ.

Bock further explains that analytic thinking skills, whether or not they were
derived from a CS degree or another degree (Statistics in his case) or not
from a degree at all, are the important factor.

------
bproctor
Some of the best developers I've hired don't have a degree. When looking at
resumes, I don't really care about their academics.

------
mcguire
I'm sorry, did Prof. Raffa really just admit to the First Great Sin of Dante
Studies---taking the Inferno in isolation, separate from the Purgatorio and
Paradiso? I do believe he did! And he's from UTAustin! Argh! And he's the
Danteworlds[1] guy! Salvami!

[1]
[http://danteworlds.laits.utexas.edu/](http://danteworlds.laits.utexas.edu/)

------
pixelmade
For the most part, HR are a group that believes in data, but rarely uses it
during evaluation and hiring decisions.

------
collyw
The skills he talks about are useful, for lawyers, politicians, sales and
other such professions. They are useful in STEM type subjects as well, but
usually only if you have the "harder" CS / science / maths type skills as
well.

------
tsunamifury
It's google's loss. And believe me it will be. A CS degree may be the best
signal of a worker who will program all day, but it's not a good signal for
the wide variety of other skills that are required to make a popular, well
rounded and valuable product.

For example, making a workflow that is general understandable for the average
user requires a strong set of less defined soft skills, like empathy, clarity
of thesis, interviewing skills and a translation of discrete systems into
metaphors non CS majors can work with.

And to be fair, google already seems to know this as they are trying to
minimize the power of engineers in consumer facing product groups.

~~~
TheCapn
I think its more feasible and smart of Google to find engineers with a subset
of soft skills that you describe than hire on those soft skills alone and hope
they have a subset of technical skills.

~~~
tsunamifury
I think this is a false attitude that comes from a rather egotistical belief
that engineers can 'do anything' \-- so just be an engineer and then do other
things too.

Have you watched an engineer design an interface? Its not their speciality
because they simply don't have the time to concentrate on such things. Have
you seen them write marketing copy? Create HR requirements? Cast product
visions?

They usually aren't good at these things because it isn't their speciality.
Why would anyone argue that engineers are good at everything and ignore the
concentrations that yield very real and measurable value to the products.

------
nextstepguy
Google has such an arrogant culture for an ephemeral company built around the
sole business to milk indirectly their customers with online advertisement.

------
jgwynn2901
Growing up in housing projects I had a hard time realizing how many people
internalized even the most egregious stereotypes as fact.

Spent a lot of time in gyms with a lot of hypertrophied chest, shoulder and
arms walking on crane legs.

Thinks we don't really know how to measure each other when it comes to it.

Never met a carpenter who didn't complain about the prior carpenter's work.

Finds there's a lot of ways to describe things and some say more than they are
designed and often leave a bitter aftertaste.

------
theop
Are there enough diverse people to satisfy companies' diversity index goal?

------
phaus
In writing, critical thinking amounts to having an opinion on something. I
think the author is mistaking something that's tedious for something that's
rigorous.

------
danso
There's so much to say here about the incompetence of the OP that it's better
to write a long blog post about it...so I'll just leave it at this.

First of all, check out the source material, which is this Thomas Friedman
column:

[http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/20/opinion/sunday/friedman-
ho...](http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/20/opinion/sunday/friedman-how-to-get-a-
job-at-google-part-2.html?_r=0)

The OP is suggesting that the Google exec doesn't value the skills in the
humanities departments. This is not _even remotely true_. Read the Friedman
column for yourself:

> _Are the liberal arts still important?_

> > _They are “phenomenally important,” he said, especially when you combine
> them with other disciplines. “Ten years ago behavioral economics was rarely
> referenced. But [then] you apply social science to economics and suddenly
> there’s this whole new field. I think a lot about how the most interesting
> things are happening at the intersection of two fields._

So basically, the OP basis for argument is a little off-kilter. But where the
OP is incredibly wrong is his interpretation of the following:

> _I told that student they are much better off being a B student in computer
> science than an A+ student in English because it signals a rigor in your
> thinking and a more challenging course load._

The OP is aggreieved because he interprets Bock's statement as saying that
English doesn't have the same critical thinking skills as computer science.
Bock is not saying that at all, he is saying to a student that leaving comsci,
because the courses are too challenging, is a bad idea, and that he/she
shouldn't prize an A in an "easier" curriculum over a B in computer science,
because the value of a grade is not the only measure of skills valuable to
Google.

What's really important here is the word that Bock uses: "rigor". I'll refer
to the definition that Google's search engine brings up:

> _the quality of being extremely thorough, exhaustive, or accurate._

The OP interprets "rigor" as being "hard" or "challenging." But Bock is more
likely referring to the importance of _accuracy_ and the more rigidly testable
questions in a typical computer science curriculum versus an English
curriculum. Bock does not at all talk about the intellectual challenge of
English versus Computer Science.

The fact that a professor has such a skewed, and in my opinion, _wrong_
interpretation of not just Bock's statement, but of the English word "rigor"
is itself a testament to the lack of "rigor"...or "stiffness" in how English
is evaluated.

------
hellbreakslose
I don't get why you have to argue with a company on the way it does its
recruiting. They feel that's the best for them and they have the right to.

Yes I believe that a person that studies English could become an Engineer. But
being an Engineer requires experience and time. It's not like you'll pick it
up in a day. On the other hand a person that studies CS or Engineering has
learnt the basics and its easier for him to become one.

The way google is recruiting feels the right way for them (and for me) since
they don't want to take in someone that has no idea and start teaching him on
that.

Also if someone wants to work for a Tech Company like google I don't see why
he will go study English... if English is what he likes best then why would he
pursue working under a tech company.

I think you are trying to apply the logic that all the banks have that they'll
hire whoever if he passes their tests. But they will train him into
investments and guide them through. And also that person like everyone working
on finance will have to undergo exams every-year to prove himself. (That's
pretty much like studying finance if even more advanced).

Well Google doesn't want to go with the paragraph above.

