You Don’t Need To Be A Tech Bro To Achieve Financial Independence: Celebrate The Liberal Arts

STEM, STEM, STEM, that’s all you’ve been hearing, right?  These days it seems kids are being discouraged from seeking liberal arts degrees by people who think they’ll be unemployable without a STEM degree.  I’m here to tell you, that’s nonsense.

It’s time to re-examine this wrong-think and celebrate the liberal arts again. 

Full disclosure, I’m a liberal arts major.  I have a B.A. degree in geography with a minor in history.  I did however specialize in a sub-discipline of geography called “geographic information systems”, or GIS, which is very technical and STEM-based.  The best GIS practitioners are those who have strong GIS tech skills, and supplement them with the “softer” skills of general geography and the humanities. 

Why is this?  Let me give you some reasons from my experiences.

 

Translators

Back before I semi-retired I was a senior manager of a large office.  I had 70 people working for me and a large budget.  A few of the programs I was in charge of were technology development, mostly front-facing software.

My agency does not have many advanced programmers and coders.  I work for the federal government, and the sad reality is we simply don’t pay the necessary salaries to afford those people.  An experienced Java coder in the Washington D.C. area typically demands around $110,000 a year.  Add more languages, add more money.

So I had to hire contractors do our software development.  If I stopped here you would be left with the impression that the most important people on my development projects were the coders.  After all, without them nothing happens.

Wrong!

The most important people were what I called “the translators”.  These were my best government employees who had solid and diverse liberal arts degrees underpinned by a sufficient understanding of technological principles and quantitative analysis. 

Sure, the coders are where the rubber hits the road, and they get paid well for it.  But my translators brought the diversity of thought and knowledge of human behavior (it’s called “humanities” for a reason…) necessary to make the lines of code worthwhile to a problem. 

In short, they made sure the bots were being created to serve us, and not the other way around. 

Whether their background was in sociology, psychology, history, or music, my liberal arts translators were the stars.  They applied aspects of human behavior, design ethics, and user experience to the projects in a way that pure coders usually could not. 

They bridged the divide between specialties and made unexpected connections between problems.  My translators applied non-quantitative logic, human reasoning, and emotional intelligence to solutions.  They saw complex patterns that were not obvious.

Most importantly they communicated effectively.  It can be a cliche but I’ve found it mostly true – my pure coders were Mountain Dew drinking machines who often weren’t great conversation.  Not all of them, but more than in other disciplines.

Let’s face it, in the white collar world most jobs are group projects and being schooled in psychology and emotional intelligence is pretty handy in that environment.

 

The Future Isn’t So Close

It’s hard to read anything about the future of jobs these days without being warned about the rise of automation, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and neural nets.  And the associated job losses that will come with them. 

I’ve found much of the hype to be exaggerated, but do realize these things are advancing and saw it firsthand.  But like most tech prognostications, the future isn’t as close to reality as the zeitgeist would have you believe. 

C’mon, it’s 2020 and we still don’t have flying cars, or even fully autonomous ones.  And we won’t anytime soon. 

Machines are programmed to be ruthless, efficient, and rule-abiding.  Humans are messy rule-breakers with the ability to analyze a situation in a case-by-case basis.  If we want more sophisticated tools and technologies such as autonomous cars, we need the latter engineered into the system.  The messy. 

Because sophisticated systems rarely follow rules blindly.

We need a combination of art and science.  We need context brought to code.

 

Liberal Arts = Valuable

There’s a cliche in the financial independence community that we’re all “tech bros” who make huge salaries.  Tech bros are obviously important and have significantly contributed to so many of the amazing tools of modern life such as cell phones and the internet. 

But as the future tools and wonders of tomorrow inch closer and closer and become more sophisticated, our tech bros will increasingly need a huge assist from the soft skills that relate their purpose to the human condition.  The skills that a good solid liberal arts education provides.

If I had a kid going to college and they wanted to pursue a STEM degree, then great.  The future is limitless.  But if they didn’t and they had a strong leaning towards soft skills, I would tell them to ignore the chatter that they will be unemployable if they get a liberal arts degree!  I would also, however, tell them to be sure to get at least a rudimentary education in the underpinnings and basics of technology to add to their skill set.

A smart and motivated employee with a strong liberal arts education who can communicate well and translate it to technology applications will be one of the most valuable assets in the future.  My direct experience has shown that’s already been true for a while and will only be more so going forward.