Google the Humanities and What Do You Get?

About a year ago, The Times Higher Education published an article by Matthew Reisz titled "Google leads search for humanities PhD graduates." In it, Reisz claims Google believes in the "utility" of humanities graduate students and, even better, is willing to hire them. He cites two Google bigwigs, Marissa Mayer, vice president of consumer products, and Damon Horowitz, director of engineering and "in-house philosopher," and both maintain that Google actively seeks humanities professionals.

The article caught my interest at the time because I was beginning to realize the horrors of the academic job market, especially for a PhD in literature. So this seemed to give some hope to those of us seriously considering alternatives to the TT hustle. According to the article, Mayer says that in 2011 Google planned to hire 6,000 new employees, at least 4,000 of whom would be from the humanities. That seemed like a lot of jobs and I wondered what kind of jobs those would be (administrative assistants, was my first thought).

So I went over to Google's jobs page and entered "humanities" into the search field without limiting by place or department. It returned the message, "We couldn't find any jobs matching your query." I tried "liberal arts." No dice. I then thought I'd search by "books," the object of my study and the thing about which I'm most an expert. After all, doesn't Google have an entire section of its business devoted to books? Shouldn't there be a job for a book expert in there somewhere? Searching "books" did get me results (each time I've searched it's been six to ten), but nothing that has to do with Google's book business. Mostly, "books" returns administrative assistant positions (for which I would be required to "book" travel, presumably for someone very important) or something like SEC Reporting and Technical Accounting Analyst (which requires the applicant to know more than just "the books").

My field of study and my object of study got me nowhere, so I started to think about my skill set. After all, Reisz reassures his readers that we have "transferrable skills," citing June Cohen, executive producer of TED Media, who says we "learned stamina and focus and how to listen." Listening, seriously? That's the skill executives think we've developed? Not that listening isn't important, but it's not really salable on any job market. I tried "edit," instead.

Ah, much better. Seven promising results derived from an actual skill. Most of them had to do with technical writing and editing, but hey, I've written some very "technical" documents and have substantive and copyedited some of the best essays published in my field. I opened one of the job announcements, a technical writer for "Site Reliability." The job required a BA, BS, or four years of relevant experience, and the "Ability to read and understand source code written in Java, C++, Python, and/or JavaScript." What I found through surveying these jobs is that this is a standard requirement for most technical writing jobs at Google. So, no tech writing or editing for the humanities (because a C++ req pretty much eliminates all of us). The other jobs that came up weren't so much editing positions as marketing jobs with some editing responsibilities.

What is it, exactly, that Google is hiring humanities professionals to do? Again, I can't help but notice that Google cares about books and making digital books accessible and useful to people like me, but I also can't help but notice that they're not very good at it, at least not the useful part. Wouldn't it serve them to have a team of humanities professionals onboard to work alongside the technical wizards in order to deliver a product that is innovative and functional. What they've given us instead is a lot of poorly scanned books with bad machine-encoded text, unreliable metadata, and a lousy interface (yes, the search ability is nice, but we do a lot more with text than count words). Google books could have been so much better and at this point more successful if they had at least talked to a few of us (and when I say us, I mean those of us who actually work in the humanities, not the philosophical tourists, who decide, like Horowitz, that they want to take a vacation from technotopia to spend a few years ruminating on difficult questions about the way the world works, only to come back and say something lame, like a "by-product" of "intellectual passion" is that "you emerge as a desired commodity for industry").

The question is, then, and I'll phrase it in Horowitz's terms, are we really a "desired commodity" or is our study of human culture merely value added, a "by-product"? And then, did Google actually hire humanities professionals as humanities professionals this past year, and if so, what jobs did they get hired to do?