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

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?