Kuner contends that her background as a dance major improved her job performance when she was charged with doing technical support for Unix, C and Perl programming. As part of her job, she had to walk users through solutions to thorny code errors, then log the events in a database for other workers. She credits the improvements she made to the company's database to the communication skills she learned in college, saying, "Lots of geeks I know can't provide clear instructions, because they can't fathom that someone couldn't know something."

Humanities-based skills can also improve the traditional code-writing process. According to Kuner, artists bring a novel perspective to code composition, allowing them to extend the uses to which a programming language is put. Monberg, who holds a degree in sociology, has noticed that coding and engineering groups that include people trained outside the discipline are more open to innovation. "It opens the door to a more engaging cross-pollinating environment," he says. "Individual contributors are not completely locked into thinking only about their specific task."

Nor are individuals locked into one set of job skills: Scott, Kuner and Monberg all acquired specific technical skills on a compressed schedule in response to job demands, and they believe that their college education helped flatten the learning curve -- even if the connections between Unix and dancing, interior design or sociology aren't readily apparent.

College provided a mental model for learning subsequent skills, which complements the one constant in high tech: the need to keep learning. Any high-tech worker, regardless of academic background, must stay abreast of new skills to keep up in the field.

Perhaps, as those Slashdot posters argued, the learning can take place on site at a $60,000 programming job. But judging by the posts complaining, "if only Bill Gates took an OS class," there are also unarguable merits to a technical university education for engineers. Monberg himself admits that there are times when a computer science education would have come in handy: "When you get down to it, earning a CS degree provides one with some very basic practical experience."

At the heart of the higher-education debate lies the question: Do high-tech workers miss out on some crucial educational event if they skip college? There's no denying that high-tech offers something few other disciplines do -- the ability to enter and move up in an industry based on applicable skills and experience, instead of requiring a degree to even enter the arena. But having a degree doesn't prevent high-tech workers from picking up experience elsewhere. The learning skills one uses to pick up programming languages and systems operations are highly individual, and can be acquired from disciplines as diverse as music or biology. They can also be picked up through a combination of time spent on a computer and a curiosity to learn more: Kuner, Monberg and Scott all honed their technical chops through self-teaching.

What can't be picked up through hard programming experience is the discipline-specific experience that any college graduate possesses. To a biology major like me, object-oriented programming didn't make much sense when it was explained in terms of classes and constructors. But when I could map the general ideas to familiar ground -- the immune system's different types of cells and the chemical signals they send to each other are similar to classes of code objects and the embedded functional signals they each have -- I picked up the programming concept, and expanded on it in ways my computer-engineering co-workers hadn't pondered yet.

As more graduates combine their intellectual experience with practical technical skills, observers may recast the higher-education question. Instead of wondering whether college is relevant, we may ask what kind of degrees will allow high-tech workers and companies to stay fresh and keep innovating.
salon.com | April 12, 1999

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