Are STEM skills all that's needed? Google crunched the numbers.

[lpetrich]

The surprising thing Google learned about its employees — and what it means for today’s students - The Washington Post

The conventional wisdom about 21st century skills holds that students need to master the STEM subjects — science, technology, engineering and math — and learn to code as well because that’s where the jobs are. It turns out that is a gross simplification of what students need to know and be able to do, and some proof for that comes from a surprising source: Google.

The company's two founders, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, were both gifted computer scientists, and they at first looked for similar sorts of people. Like computer-science graduates with top grades from elite science universities.

But Google's engineers have also been researching their company's employees, including once finding out that success in interview puzzles does not translate into success on the job: Google admits its famous job interview questions were a ‘complete waste of time’
College Grade Point Averages do not predict success very well either.

So what does work for Google interviews? “What works well are structured behavioral interviews, where you have a consistent rubric for how you assess people,” Bock says. This includes asking a candidate to describe a real-life situation in which they solved a difficult analytical problem. This has the added benefit of showing the interviewer what the candidate considers to be a difficult analytical problem “rather than having each interviewer just make stuff up,” says Bock.

Back to my first link.

In 2013, Google decided to test its hiring hypothesis by crunching every bit and byte of hiring, firing, and promotion data accumulated since the company’s incorporation in 1998. Project Oxygen shocked everyone by concluding that, among the eight most important qualities of Google’s top employees, STEM expertise comes in dead last.

Here is what came before STEM expertise in their list -- a lot of "soft skills":

1. Being a good coach
2. Communicating and listening well
3. Possessing insights into others (including others different values and points of view)
4. Having empathy toward and being supportive of one’s colleagues
5. Being a good critical thinker and problem solver
6. Being able to make connections across complex ideas

Sort of like what one needs in the humanities, like being an English major or a theater major. So after some more analysis, Google started hiring humanities majors, artists, and even MBA's.

Project Aristotle, a study released by Google this past spring, further supports the importance of soft skills even in high-tech environments.

Google's most productive teams were not necessarily teams with the biggest experts:

Project Aristotle shows that the best teams at Google exhibit a range of soft skills: equality, generosity, curiosity toward the ideas of your teammates, empathy, and emotional intelligence. And topping the list: emotional safety. No bullying. To succeed, each and every team member must feel confident speaking up and making mistakes. They must know they are being heard.

Bullies and defenders of bullies will find that hard to take, I'm sure. They'll snivel and whine that that means turning companies into "safe spaces".

Another study of sought-after qualities in interviews reveals that communication skills are the most sought after, communication with employees and communication of a company's products and mission.

 

[Jolly_Penguin]

Was to this not a group who all had strong technical skills, all adequate, but some stronger than others? Do any of those soft skills matter in the absence of strong technical skills? I would guess not.

This looks to me like it is saying experts do better when they communicate and work well as a team, which is hardly surprising, and doesn't make students with useless humanities degrees useful.

We had a saying in my first year Engineering class. Friends don't let friends take arts. Of course in wound up switching out of Engineering. I would be earning more today had I not.

 

[LordKiran]

The surprising thing Google learned about its employees — and what it means for today’s students - The Washington Post

The company's two founders, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, were both gifted computer scientists, and they at first looked for similar sorts of people. Like computer-science graduates with top grades from elite science universities.

But Google's engineers have also been researching their company's employees, including once finding out that success in interview puzzles does not translate into success on the job: Google admits its famous job interview questions were a ‘complete waste of time’
College Grade Point Averages do not predict success very well either.

Back to my first link.

In 2013, Google decided to test its hiring hypothesis by crunching every bit and byte of hiring, firing, and promotion data accumulated since the company’s incorporation in 1998. Project Oxygen shocked everyone by concluding that, among the eight most important qualities of Google’s top employees, STEM expertise comes in dead last.

Here is what came before STEM expertise in their list -- a lot of "soft skills":

1. Being a good coach
2. Communicating and listening well
3. Possessing insights into others (including others different values and points of view)
4. Having empathy toward and being supportive of one’s colleagues
5. Being a good critical thinker and problem solver
6. Being able to make connections across complex ideas

Sort of like what one needs in the humanities, like being an English major or a theater major. So after some more analysis, Google started hiring humanities majors, artists, and even MBA's.

Project Aristotle, a study released by Google this past spring, further supports the importance of soft skills even in high-tech environments.

Google's most productive teams were not necessarily teams with the biggest experts:

Project Aristotle shows that the best teams at Google exhibit a range of soft skills: equality, generosity, curiosity toward the ideas of your teammates, empathy, and emotional intelligence. And topping the list: emotional safety. No bullying. To succeed, each and every team member must feel confident speaking up and making mistakes. They must know they are being heard.

Bullies and defenders of bullies will find that hard to take, I'm sure. They'll snivel and whine that that means turning companies into "safe spaces".

Another study of sought-after qualities in interviews reveals that communication skills are the most sought after, communication with employees and communication of a company's products and mission.

"Emotional Intelligence" Is a term that honestly needs more credibility. There's so many people out there who can have the knowledge of an academic but are so emotionally stunted its like talking to a teenager that never grew up.

None of this is particularly surprising on its face to me.

 

[barbos]

What took them so long? I remember a study done years ago which determined that job interviews are 100% meaningless. Of course it was not about about google type jobs but it is still an indication.

So what does work for Google interviews? “What works well are structured behavioral interviews, where you have a consistent rubric for how you assess people,” Bock says. This includes asking a candidate to describe a real-life situation in which they solved a difficult analytical problem. This has the added benefit of showing the interviewer what the candidate considers to be a difficult analytical problem “rather than having each interviewer just make stuff up,” says Bock.

Damn, I have been doing it for my whole life. They could have asked me for advice. Of course I myself suck immensely at standard interviews with standard trivia kind of crap which you literally have to study before going to interview. Essentially what these idiots found out is that you need to have a real talk to learn something interesting from applicants relevant experience, instead of giving them stupid IQ test.

You are shrunk to the height of a nickel and your mass is proportionally reduced so as to maintain your original density. You are then thrown into an empty glass blender. The blades will start moving in 60 seconds. What do you do?

How much should you charge to wash all the windows in Seattle?

How many times a day does a clock’s hands overlap?

A man pushed his car to a hotel and lost his fortune. What happened?

Is this for real? they were asking that?

And yeah, OP made a wrong conclusion. Counting golf balls is not STEM.

 

[barbos]

Was to this not a group who all had strong technical skills, all adequate, but some stronger than others? Do any of those soft skills matter in the absence of strong technical skills? I would guess not.

OP made a wrong conclusion. It's not that technical skills don't matter. It' that the methods they were using to determine these skills was simply wrong.

This looks to me like it is saying experts do better when they communicate and work well as a team, which is hardly surprising, and doesn't make students with useless humanities degrees useful.

Well, useless humanities degrees can help you to bullshit through interview even at Google it seems.

 

[Trausti]

Was to this not a group who all had strong technical skills, all adequate, but some stronger than others? Do any of those soft skills matter in the absence of strong technical skills? I would guess not.

That's what the conclusion in the OP misses. From the article:

Google originally set its hiring algorithms to sort for computer science students with top grades from elite science universities.

In 2013, Google decided to test its hiring hypothesis by crunching every bit and byte of hiring, firing, and promotion data accumulated since the company’s incorporation in 1998. Project Oxygen shocked everyone by concluding that, among the eight most important qualities of Google’s top employees, STEM expertise comes in dead last.

STEM experience comes in dead last because Google already got the crème de la crème. STEM was a common factor. And there is also restriction of range.

The reason your correlation is so low (and note that this dynamic applies to typical linear regression procedures as well) is that there simply isn’t enough variation in one of your numbers to get a high metric of relationship. You’ve fallen victim to a restriction of range.

restriction of range: what it is and why it matters

If STEM competence was so unimportant, how did these tech companies achieve such high success having relied on it for the last couple decades?

 

[lpetrich]

If STEM competence was so unimportant, how did these tech companies achieve such high success having relied on it for the last couple decades?

Because one needs to make business deals and decide what to develop and stuff like that.

 

[TV and credit cards]

So, a well rounded education from a university that doesn't treat the humanities as a joke, i.e., the student just has to provide an answer. It doesn't have to have anything to do with the question. Just turn something in? Wow. What an epiphany.

It's a good thing Google crunched all that data. How else could they have possibly come to the conclusion they came to? It's kind of funny actually. Even in determining there is more to people than STEM, they buried their heads in data to figure it out. We're all doomed.

 

[T.G.G. Moogly]

I seriously doubt that the way the study was presented is the way the study proceeded. STEM skills are absolutely necessary in a given line of work so maybe these skills were taken for granted after the fact. If you're a machine shop you need machinists and a cadre of support staff, but you're fucked without those machinists.

Carl Sagan was a great communicator but he was also a great scientist. He once stated that the true heroes of NASA were not the Gene Krantz and Neil Armstrong types but the people who crunched the numbers, built the machines and coded the telemetry, but that none of us will ever know their names. So very true.

That's not to say that we don't need folks like Krantz and Armstrong, only that they are no more important than the people who figure out how to build the things that everyone else then takes for granted.

People are just like pieces of a machine. A good communicator, coach, person with vision, can put the machine together. And if you possess a bit of empathy and are genuinely curious about what another person is doing to the point where you can help them solve problems and empower them, I really wouldn't want you wasting yourself sweeping floors on the off-shift in my company either.

 

[barbos]

NASA could actually take advantage of better STEM. Recent stories from them (EM drive experiments) shows that not everything is fine in STEM department there. I also know a former NASA guy who is an idiot to put it mildly. But he was in Space Shuttle mission control or something there.