What the Head of Hiring at Google Doesn’t Understand About Skills

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.

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".

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.)

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.

> 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.

@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.

"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.

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.

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.

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.)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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/

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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...

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.

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.