Google, a company known for its unique work culture and test driven development, decided to test and measure its hiring practices. What it found was surprising.
In 2013, Google decided to test its hiring hypothesis 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 despite their technical training, not because of it?
It’s my belief that English majors can be just as good programmers as STEM graduates, and in some cases even better. For example, object-oriented programming can be likened to diagramming sentences: properties are the nouns and adjectives, methods are the verbs, and events are conjunctions (as they can affect other classes).
Make no mistake, you still need the logical and analytical thinking that STEM provides. But that’s just the starting point. In order to succeed in technology, you have to be able to bring in other skills and mindsets that come from different backgrounds (like theater, cooking, or art) to really produce something unique and irreplaceable.
Scott Adams, in his book How to Fail at Almost Anything and Still Win Big, lays out a concept he calls the talent stack. Basically having a talent stack means being moderately good at many different unrelated things, and then allowing those different talents to combine together to produce a particular talent no one else can duplicate. In his own words, “when it comes to skills, quantity often beats quality.”
STEM skills are only the foundations of technological success. Whether you build a palace or a shack on it depends on the other skills you bring to the table.