When has humanities/history knowledge helped you in tech?

Question

Personally, I've been reading about how historical empires handled delegation and trust&mdash;who gets autonomy, who needs oversight, how that scales. Finding it weirdly applicable to how I think about system design and working with AI tools.Curious if others have pulled from history/humanities in ways that actually transferred.

elbci · Accepted Answer

separation of concerns -> division of labor (hint: there's always a power imbalance even if it's hidden under reification)

jbreckmckye · Answer

I think a lot of programming - the more business focused, application minded stuff - is a kind of analytical philosophy. You spend a lot of time as a dev working on "domain logic" which requires you to be very exacting in your terminology and carefully distinguish between ideas.
You can go too far with this, and waste time on taxonomy, but for the most part it's a good idea to subject your classes, variables, components to some kind of philosophical scrutiny.
(My degree was in English Literature though, which doesn't help as much, though I think I'm pretty good at naming variables. £40,000 well spent!)

fiftyacorn · Answer

This was a long time ago but I done german with my engineering degree, and was required to do a half course in some cultural aspect of german. Timetabling meant i often had to take what was left - so id end up doing history of art class, or german history
It worked out ok in the end as you see the differences between arts and sciences - science courses collaboration was about getting the right answer most of the time, while arts was about defending your opinion
So the long term benefit has been my communication skills improved and helped me