Post #2832576

@soph@grrl.me @hazelweakly@hachyderm.io @adub@kolektiva.social My job as lead IT architect was to get people talking and converge on a solution that would help the people who could benefit from better information and automation of tasks that humans couldn't do well or didn't want to do. Although I had Comp Sci qualifications, and had written almost a million lines of code, that was just a barely-useful requirement to get the job. My most useful qualifications were: - Formally, experience as a social worker and grad school in philosophy. Maths helped a little, in knowing how to read and question statistics. - Informally, wide reading and lengthy discussions with academic friends in the social sciences and political activity in organizing for progressive movements and a socialist political party. - From social work, an ability to listen carefully and ask questions to help people say what they found hard to express, and a knowledge of how to deal with bureaucracy. (Not always possible 😟) From philosophy, as you say, ethics was most important, and a toolkit for analyzing complex problems. Although there are other combinations of skills and experience that help with the role, I agree that getting people to see that tech skills are low on the requirements list is the hard problem.