STEM Blindness
Doesn’t anyone read anymore?
I would put my money on a CTO who casually references Melville or Dickens over one who only builds side project apps or tinkers with the latest LLM tools on the weekends. Having both traits would be ideal, but the senior technical leader with only hacker vibes and no humanities experience will lead ultimately to ruin.
The humanities are more important for senior leadership than technical skill or domain knowledge. The best CTOs have a strong command of language and a good sense of people, in addition to their technical background. And you get that from studying the humanities, whether formally or informally. The humanities exposes one to the nuances of the human experience. Technical skill only focuses on machines, abstract or concrete, not how they affect the people who build them or the people who use them. A tech leader with letters under their belt is more likely to succeed at the top than one with only numbers in their toolbox.
I recently discovered the Paper Ceiling campaign. This initiative, funded by the likes of McKinsey, Walmart, and Chevron, and other masters of industry, is pushing for more openness to workers with diverse education backgrounds. Specifically, workers who did not take the traditional college route to enter the workforce.
I’m all for championing the life paths of those who have chosen to do things in an untraditional manner. As an entrepreneur, I have strenuously avoided a steady corporate job all of my career, for example. And certainly, these days, there are many ways to gain an education apart from the traditional 4-year degree. My oldest son, getting close to college age, is entertaining a variety of non-traditional education paths, and I fully support his freedom to take a different path than I did.
But while the Paper Ceiling concept sounds good on the surface, what do these funders really want in their workers? These gigantic companies and their Big Four consulting allies all have an abysmal track record in terms of making the world a better place. Is this truly an altruistic venture?
What’s a more likely motive is they want to create a pipeline of workers with enough technical knowledge to produce innovative value for them, but a lack of the critical thinking skills from the humanities to challenge the status quo in any way. The initiative caps a decades-long shift in focus away from on the humanities to the technical arts in corporate hiring practices.
With the explosion of Internet-powered businesses after the first dot com boom, there emerged a trend in education policy of emphasizing STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) over the humanities in the US education system. The stated logic was one of revitalizing the economy and creating a generation of workers who were prepared to be competitive with the rest of the global market.
The emphasis on diversity in the STEM fields has created a necessary policy pressure advocating for more women and people of color to have access to lucrative technology jobs. And while it has had some effect, much more needs to be done to diversify these fields.
However, an over emphasis on STEM to address the competitive pressures from the global market has also led to a wholesale abandonment of the humanities in education policy overall.
Starting in the 1990s, the academy came under attack. It would take a whole book to lay out how this worked, and indeed there are already some great ones out there. Suffice it to say, cuts in public expenditure in university funding, coupled with increased privatization, put all academic domains under unprecedented market pressure. Suddenly, all research must be marketable, declared policy makers, and funding for social sciences became increasingly difficult to secure.
In parallel, the now thoroughly discredited trend of standardized testing in primary and secondary schooling shifted the focus away from teaching a broader range of subjects and critical thinking skills to a focus on mere rote memorization of curriculum, or “teaching to the test” as it is pilloried by professionals the education field. Teaching to the test became the way to ensure high scores upon which funding for schools now depended.
These trends of teaching to the test in elementary, middle, and high schools across the country and increased private funding for marketable research in lieu of public funding for learning for its own sake has dramatically shifted the culture in the US over the course of just one generation. You can see its impact clearly in the tone and volatility of our civic discussions today.
Coupled with the rise in dominance of tech in our economy, a lack of strength in the humanities has contributed to the tone-deafness with which the titans of the tech industry view the impact of their innovations on society. Ignorance of the humanities in tech leadership becomes a more pressing matter by the day, with real world consequences emerging on many fronts.
History is critical to understanding how our current society got the way it is, and what parts of it are more or less likely to change again in the future. Literature teaches us how humans are likely to interact in a wide range of scenarios. Despite being contrived scenarios, great fiction is penned by keen observers of human behavior and one can learn a lot about society and culture from reading great fiction. Social sciences like politics, economics, sociology, and anthropology illuminate what is at stake in our communities as we head into uncertain territory with shifting global power dynamics and increasing threats from climate change.
The modern technology leader, striving for a seat at the executive table, would be wise to embrace the humanities. If one seeks a successful career at the top of the organization, and not to be replaced for failing to deliver, one’s command of the humanities—essentially, the study of people—can make all the difference. If one has not had the opportunity to learn humanities through formal routes, taking time specifically to read, listen, or watch materials on these subjects would be a very worthy investment.
A CTO can be technically smart, but if they don’t really grasp the people elements inherent in building and shipping products, they will be unable to lead their organization successfully. Being a well-rounded leader, with a firm grasp on both technical subjects and broader aspects of learning enabled through the humanities, will unlock access to new levels of accomplishment that are simply not available to the merely technically-minded. Those unfortunates will stay locked in the engine room, and never make it to the bridge. And they certainly will be given no chance to actually steer the ship.
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