TITLE: Why a CS Major Might Minor in Anthropology
AUTHOR: Eugene Wallingford
DATE: November 17, 2012 12:23 PM
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Paul Klipp wrote a nice piece recently on
<A HREF="http://paulklipp.com/blog/emic-and-etic-approaches-to-coaching/">
   emic and etic approaches to explaining team behavior</A>.
He explains what emic and etic approaches are and then shows
how they apply to the consultant's job.  For example:

<BLOCKQUOTE><EM>
Let's look at an example closer to home for us software
folks.  You're an agile coach, arriving in a new environment
with a mission from management to "make this team more agile".
If you, like so many consultants in most every field, favor an
etic approach, you will begin by doing a gap analysis between
the behaviors and artifacts that you see and those with which
you are most familiar.  That's useful, and practically
inevitable.  The next natural step, however, may be less
helpful.  That is to judge the gaps between what this team is
doing and what you consider to be normal as wrong....  By
deciding, as a consultant or coach, to now attempt to prepare
an emic description of the team's behaviors, you force yourself
to set aside your preconceptions and engage in meaningful
conversations with the team in order to understand how they
see themselves.  Now you have two tools in your kit, where you
might before have had one, and more tools prepares you for more
situations.
</EM></BLOCKQUOTE>

When I speak to HS students and their parents, and when I advise
freshmen, I suggest that the consider picking up a minor or a
second major.  I tell them that it almost doesn't matter which
other discipline they choose.  College is a good time to broaden
oneself, to enjoy learning for its own sake.  Some minors and
second majors may seem more directly relevant to a CS grad's
career interests, but you never know what domain or company you
will end up working in.  You never know when having studied a
seemingly unrelated discipline will turn out to be useful.

Many students are surprised when I recommend social sciences such
as psychology, sociology, and anthropology as great partners for
CS.  Their parents are, too.  Understanding people, both
individually and in groups, is important in any profession, but
it is perhaps more important for CS grads than many.  We build
software -- for people.  We teach new languages and techniques
-- to people.  We contract out our services to organizations --
of people.  We introduce new practices and methodologies to
organizations -- of people.  Ethnography may be a more important
to a software consultant's success than any set of business
classes.

I had my first experience with this when I was a graduate student
working in the area of knowledge-based systems.  We built systems
that aimed to capture the knowledge of human experts, often teams
of experts.  We found that they relied a lot on tacit knowledge,
both in their individual expertise and in the fabric of their
teams.  It wasn't until I read some papers from John McDermott's
research group at Carnegie Mellon that I realized we were all
engaged in ethnographic studies.  It would have been so useful
to have had some background in anthropology!
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