Poking through 13+ years of posts I find information that’s as useful now as when it was written.

Golden Oldies is a collection of the most relevant and timeless posts during that time.

I love being vindicated (again). When I wrote this in 2015 I took a lot of ribbing from my young techie friends, who saw tech as the only road to the good life, while liberal arts was the road to oblivion. That was the story being hyped by most media, too. I never bought it, nor did Nick Kristof, who said as much in no uncertain terms in his column The New York Times. Nothing has changed, as you’ll see tomorrow.

Read other Golden Oldies here.

I constantly read/hear that if you want your kids to have a good life focus on a purely STEM curriculum and they’ll be home free.

Moreover, if they are great at coding they don’t even need college.

While it may be true, at least at this point in time, that they can get a good job if they have strong coding skills, what they are unlikely to get is a promotion that takes them beyond coding, whether in a technical or leadership/management role.

Pulitzer Prize winner (twice) Nicholas Kristof, a columnist for The New York Times, with 1.4 million followers on Twitter, 1.3 million followers on Google+ and 600,000 followers on Facebook (click ‘more’ to see his bio) sums up the value of a humanities, AKA, liberal arts, degree 1, 2, 3.

First, liberal arts equip students with communications and interpersonal skills that are valuable and genuinely rewarded in the labor force, especially when accompanied by technical abilities.

My second reason: We need people conversant with the humanities to help reach wise public policy decisions, even about the sciences.

Third, wherever our careers lie, much of our happiness depends upon our interactions with those around us, and there’s some evidence that literature nurtures a richer emotional intelligence.

Even the most rabid coders don’t want to do it for 40 years.

But if your knowledge of society is limited to code and your ability to interact with others is negligible, then you are left with little choice.

Even a degree in STEM or business won’t give you the broad outlook or emotional intelligence it takes to be promoted, let alone start a successful company.

The best way to assure yourself a bright future, whether you decide to code or earn a “useful” degree, is to patronize your library as so many “self-made” folks did/do

Stay away from your area of expertise, instead wander sections of which you have no knowledge, select books randomly and read at every opportunity.

Image credit: Susanne Nilsson

There was a time when the words used in job ads actually made sense.

These days the words used seem to have little relation to either the skills needed or the opportunities offered.

For example, courage

Courage is mentioned in a variety of job postings for minimum wage retail and service work. Companies like JCPenney (where an ideal employee will “show the confidence and courage to do what’s right“), Ann Taylor (in which one “has the courage to know who she is“), and Lululemon (wherein a worker “leads with courage, knowing the possibility of greatness is bigger than the fear of failure“) ask for it specifically in job ads.

Does that mean the employee can expect a positive outcome if they have the courage to report their boss, another executive or a customer for harassment?

Then there are the companies looking for passionate workers.

Lisa Cohen, an associate professor of organizational behavior at McGill University’s Desautels School of Management shared that passion is a common attribute that companies she’s spoken with want, but they struggle to explain why.

“They haven’t defined the term,” she said. “They don’t know why it matters and probably what they’re looking for—and they’ll put this in not particularly nice terms—is somebody who’s going to work like crazy for long hours, right?”

Hiring for intangibles is smart, but it should be for traits that actually matter, as opposed to smoke and glitter.

Image credit: Robert Nunnally

Last week in a post about responsibility and the difference between Microsoft and other tech giants I said that change was coming, driven in by a surprising source.

The change is to antitrust law.

The University of Chicago is the intellectual birthplace of the consensus in antitrust thinking over the last four decades — that monopoly law should place consumer interests, usually in the form of lower prices, above the concerns of smaller business rivals.

Big tech has been protected, because you can’t get lower than free, but people are waking up to the fact that free isn’t actually free.

More importantly, so is the University of Chicago and a growing list of experts.

But amid growing concerns about the unchecked power of today’s tech giants, economists and legal scholars are questioning whether the Chicago School still makes sense. Even the university’s own faculty is starting to publicly challenge the ideology.

It’s about time.

Considering how fast the world moves these days there is no excuse for those who are supposed to protect us to move at glacial speed.

At last year’s summit, Makan Delrahim, the Justice Department official in charge of antitrust, told attendees that his view of the cost of free platforms “has changed” with a greater understanding of the nature and scope of data collection and sharing.

Duh. No kidding.

Makes you wonder how the European Union figured it out so much quicker.

Or not.

Image credit: Luiz Gadelha Jr.