Name: 【TED】Eric Berridge: Why tech needs the humanities (Why tech needs the humanities | Eric Berridge)
Uploaded: 2018-05-22T15:28:31.000Z
Duration: 11 min 13 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

and come out with a $200 million business?

That's what happened to us about 10 years ago.

We had this huge client that was killing us.

and we couldn't find a very specific programming skill

to help this client deploy a cutting-edge cloud system.

but none of them could please this client.

and we're hanging out with our bartender friend Jeff,

and he's doing what all good bartenders do:

he's commiserating with us, making us feel better,

saying, "Hey, these guys are overblowing it.

So the next morning, we're hanging out in our team meeting,

I say, "Hey, I mean, we're about to be fired."

"Why don't we send in Jeff, the bartender?"

And there's some silence, some quizzical looks.

Finally, my chief of staff says, "That is a great idea."

In fact, he had dropped out of Penn as a philosophy major.

He had completely disarmed their fixation on the programming skill.

The conversation was now about what we were going to build and why.

And yes, Jeff figured out how to program the solution,

and the client became one of our best references.

and half of our company was made up of computer science majors or engineers,

but our experience with Jeff left us wondering:

Could we repeat this through our business?

So we changed the way we recruited and trained.

And while we still sought after computer engineers and computer science majors,

we sprinkled in artists, musicians, writers ...

and Jeff's story started to multiply itself throughout our company.

Our chief technology officer is an English major,

and he was a bike messenger in Manhattan.

yet still less than a hundred have degrees in computer science or engineering.

And yes, we're still a computer consulting firm.

We're the number one player in our market.

We work with the fastest-growing software package

to ever reach 10 billion dollars in annual sales.

Meanwhile, the push for STEM-based education in this country --

science, technology, engineering, mathematics --

Since 2009, STEM majors in the United States

dedicated over a billion dollars towards STEM education

recently redirected 200 million dollars of Department of Education funding

And CEOs are continually complaining about an engineering-starved workforce.

coupled with the undeniable success of the tech economy --

seven out of the 10 most valuable companies in the world by market cap

that the path of our future workforce will be dominated by STEM.

It's like, the entire soccer team chases the ball into the corner,

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【TED】Eric Berridge: Why tech needs the humanities (Why tech needs the humanities | Eric Berridge)

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