Computer Science and “soft” skills

My friend Jennifer Anyaegbunam (@JenniferAdaeze) has published a new piece on HuffingtonPost about the role of humanities in medical education.

Matriculating into medical school, we were proud of our humanities roots and felt it made us uniquely poised to become great clinicians. Yet, we have often found that we have had to defend our educational choices to interviewers, advisors and even our peers– something science majors rarely, if ever, have to do. This is because the medical humanities is often regarded as a “second tier” or an extracurricular interest and not something that is fundamental to the practice of medicine.

She finds that the humanities are derided in a classroom setting, as well:

Courses on ethics and social science are few and far between. To make matters worse, students often do not take these exercises seriously, and these courses are often the ones with the poorest attendance, for example

Here, I’ll offer a parallel from a different field: computer science.

As a computer science major at NYU, I too encountered hostility and a dismissive attitude toward the humanities and other “softer” fields from my peers.

A traditional computer science curriculum consists of mathematics, algorithms, and theory. These are important areas of academic interest, and provide a good foundation for thinking about the deepest problems surrounding computation. But the vast majority of computer science majors don’t go on to research computation. They go on to practice it — by becoming software professionals (programmers), writing applications used by real people.

It turns out that to be a successful software professional, you need much more than a computer science background. Indeed, many of the world’s most successful programmers have no computer science background at all. My father was a software professional, but when he graduated from college, computer science did not even exist as a field of study!

You need software design skills, which are often not taught except in a trivial way in traditional curriculums. It is considered “vocational”. You need communication, management, and product design skills. These are too “soft” to be taken seriously.

The industry suffers from a widespread lack of these skills.

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