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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
by tsunamifury 12y ago
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 12y agoI 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 12y agoI 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.