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Let me lay my biased cards out on the table now: I believe college is more than a job training school. I believe that the best value from college
comes in the old-fashioned, untrendy, liberal arts education.
I hear the hiring managers groaning now, saying, "But I need technical expertise." True, you do. But the expertise you need today for
tomorrow's technology is not taught to students graduating this spring because the technology hasn't filtered down to colleges yet.
I hear those of you looking for new positions saying, "But I majored in engineering." That's great. But often, engineering projects depend on
someone who can absorb mountains of new material, think critically while filtering the information, put their intelligence and reasoning to work, and
clearly write the results. None of those skills were available at the engineering schools I checked.
When I hired people, I always looked for something in the candidate's background that indicated the ability to tackle large, complicated goals and
conquer them. The task didn't have to be in their job area; it rarely was.
How can you judge one member of a twenty-member programming team? You can't. How can you measure a young man looking to do network consulting while in
his first year of college? In Jon's case, I measured the fact that he earned a black belt in karate at the age of 18. That didn't tell me he could
design or manage NetWare networks, the task at hand, but it told me he conquered a long, difficult course of study over a period of several years.
Did I worry if he would attack a problem until solved? Nope. Did I worry he would quit when things got difficult? Nope. Turns out he was an excellent
person to work with, and I turned over my consulting customers to him when I started writing full time.
Big deal, you scoff, I always know exactly what technical experience applies to every job in the company. Really? How, pray tell, did you find your
first team of Web Developers?
When the Web exploded six years ago, there were no "webmasters" or anyone else who knew how to make a web page appear in a 1.0 version
browser. The Web pulled graphic artists, writers, pseudo-programmers, and all manner of other non-traditional development people into the vortex.
Certainly at the beginning, and maybe still today, web site creation embodied less science and more art.
Factoid: Technical managers are using an assessment examination called TekXam (www.tekxam.com) that measures technology and problem-solving skills
within a technology environment. In other words, you can use this test to discover that many liberal arts graduates understand a lot more about
technology than computer science grads understand about creativity throughout history.
Let's look at that "throughout history" tag. Everyone complains about pink-cheeked youngsters who understand nothing beyond their own
experiences and believe caveman gave way to MTV. But arts majors study disciplines that cover centuries and know well where they fit in the continuum.
The majority of mainstream music and art was created before the United States split from Britain. Shakespeare nailed every human foible 400 years ago.
Another factoid: EDS, a company with plenty of experience judging programmers, has their own Systems Engineer Development program, which is essentially
a six week programming boot camp. My wife went through there with flying colors as an English major. EDS admits that liberal arts majors, particularly
music majors, do better than any other group except computer science.
I once heard a programmer whining for respect since he had to worry about every bit of a program, from the high-level architecture to every 1 and 0. But
he doesn't program in binary, so the 1 and 0 argument lost immediately. Since composers (my background) have to worry about every note for every
instrument for an entire orchestra, I was particularly unimpressed. Authors must manage every letter in every word of novels. Actors must memorize
entire plays and carry on when others forget their own lines. Liberal arts graduates have, almost without exception, displayed more individual
achievement doing complex, analytical tasks than have other undergraduates.
If you hire people, consider a wider range of educational experiences tomorrow than you did yesterday. If you manage people, encourage graduate study in
less technical fields, so some team members learn new, (cliché alert) "out of the box" thinking techniques supported by a wide background.
Art, music, history, literature, theater, and philosophy will all teach students about problems people have solved, including why and how they solved
them. Any wonder why a liberal education turns out such wonderful project managers? Try one, you'll like the result.
Understanding people will make your career go further than just understanding compiler architecture. After all, compilers don't hire or promote you.
People do.
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