NO PLACE FOR TECHNICIANS: HOW HUMANITARIANS CONQUER SILICON VALLEY The dictatorship of professionals with an engineering degree in technology rooted in the past: more and more in demand are in the humanities - they are better able to establish a dialogue with the user. Slack Technologies - one of the most important in the world of startups, "marriageable": with an audience of 1.1 million users and investors estimate of $ 2.8 billion to support teamwork goes online for a long time to display venture capital. If you've ever enjoyed Slack, you know: the key "chip" project Slackbot, avatar assistant, capable of giving advice and prompt with a jeweler's precision, so that the whole time suspect in bot the human mind. It does not tell you how to write a good hook for a research paper, but it indeed brings a lot of pleasure. Such ingenuity and indeed can not be programmed: for a creative approach bot meets one of the 180 employees Slack - 38-year-old Anna Picard, editorial director of the company. She managed to finish the University of Manchester in "theater" before disillusioned with the profession because of the constant humiliation at auditions and castings. After living for some time underworking blogging scripts for video games and even the execution of the role of the cat in one of the performances, Picard suddenly found his calling in technology. She relished writing funny and original responses to user requests, which ever write something like: "I love you, SlackbotÂť. Mission, Anna explains, is to "surprise and delight". The output Packard has an option to purchase shares Slack - good compensation for the change of profession.
Who came to invite frustrated actress to work in the B2B-start dealing with the software? Author adventurous ideas - Stewart Butterfield, 42-year-old kofaunder and CEO of Slack, whose two-digit share in the company is estimated to be a six-figure sum from the $ 300 million he himself the flesh of the humanities: a BA in philosophy at the Canadian University of Victoria and a Master of Philosophy and History of Science -. in Cambridge.
"Philosophy has taught me two things - Butterfield said in an interview of Forbes, which CEO Slack gives the company's headquarters in San Francisco, the Mecca of programmers around the world. - First of all, I learned how important it is to clearly express their thoughts. Secondly - how important it is to the end to defend their case, it is a big help in the negotiations. And the history of science - it is also a story debunking misconceptions and myths that people can believe for centuries. " The philosophical approach Butterfield congenial business Slack. The most advanced engineering minds in Silicon Valley, at least fifteen years struggled with convenient recipe software for collective intelligence management system. However, output repeatedly obtained defective product rejects users. Slack managed to build a bridge between technology and man. This intuitive and functionally simple service has taken the best from its predecessors in the range from Dropbox to Twitter and now helps users to work with structured documents, photos and data files in the logical channels for easy sorting. Simplifying the corporate routine must not seem a daunting task, if you like Butterfield, spent his youth for the analysis of the works of Ludwig Wittgenstein. But the creator of Slack not unique. All the leading US technology hubs from Silicon Valley to Seattle and from Boston to Austin, software companies are rediscovering the value of the humanities. Engineers continue to receive the highest wages in the industry, but employers visionaries Facebook-scale and Uber are willing to invest more in netehnarey. Especially such talents are valued in sales and marketing. The more advanced programmers dream that will write code that will change the world, the more they need support to socialized "alchemists" that could lead them to the consumer and packaged in an attractive wrapper progress. Something similar happened in 1920, when the revolution in the automotive industry has spawned countless related jobs for specialists, "been applying" machine in the daily lives: marketers, salespeople,
trainers, repairmen, and so on. The same effect is observed today. As they say professors at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Eric Brinyolfsson and Andrew McAfee in his recent book, The Second Machine Age, the industry comes an innovative division of labor: all routine work is done by computers, and the person is connected to execute the task, which he still has no equal - generating creative ideas and actions to be implemented in the big data universe. According to the forecast of the US Department of Labor, by 2022, about one million Americans will be engaged in teaching activities. Another 1.1 million will take jobs in sales. And the trend does not provide schools with supermarkets, and technology. It will be highly paid coaches, business coaches, writers workshops and sales managers. For comparison: in the same time interval the number of engineering jobs will increase by only 279 500 units and will provide the labor market is not more than 3% growth. Technological specialization in itself will not solve the unemployment problem in the long term confirms partner McKinsey Global Institute, Michael Chui. Humanitarian trend is not entered in the state agenda. The labor market is the United States reigns "tech-oriented" model in which engineering education - almost the only way to success. Barack Obama relentlessly urges to spend more on higher education that train technicians. In a February interview with Re / code proclaimed president of programming lessons "huge priority": "Learn this should not be a bunch of kids - this should all learn."
De facto non-technical people already benefit from the rapid growth of the "foreign" industry. Significantly Statistics can be easily assembled on LinkedIn. 62,887 users of social networks for professionals in the last decade have graduated from Northwestern University (Illinois). Of these, 3426 are now building a career in Silicon Valley, popular among employers - Google, Apple, Facebook and the same LinkedIn. From this sample, in turn, only 30% are engineers and other IT professionals. The rest are those non-technicians who settled in the area of sales and marketing (14%), teaching (6%), consulting (5%), expansion of the customer's network (5%) and other niches ranging from product management to the real estate market. Add to them working in the Valley of the graduates of faculties of psychology, history and other humanities and it turns out that programmers are no longer the dominant force. Another striking example of a successful non-technician - Account Manager Slack Rachel Lee, in 2011, graduated from Berkeley University. The company is only a few months, but has already implemented important project - a large construction company has helped to implement software in smartphones Slack employees, so that they can keep track of a bunch of online workflow, from the supply of building materials to monitor legislative innovations. Lee admits that awe relates to colleagues who write code. Those in response to respect her ability to "communicate with end-users and find out what they want."