In my experience, many of those requirements are waived or reduced in engineering and CS programs because of their significantly higher eng/CS course load. Not to mention those programs typically have a higher rate of students graduating in >4 years.
So yeah, you're technically right, but it's disappointing to see universities actively moving in the other direction. Of course, it still seems like university hires are woefully unprepared on day one, though I think many of us agree that 6-12 months of "real world" training for new hires is unavoidable.
My own anecdotal experience as a BA working in $BigTechCorp is that basic skills usually studied in the humanities are woefully lacking in many of my peers: writing/grammar, the ability to understand others' perspectives, and most of all ethics. The number of times I've had to say something like "uhhh, no, you can't do that, it's illegal" or explained to someone why maybe adding more telemetry to a client-side explanation may be controversial.
Anecdote: I went to a small private college in the Midwest (around 1,000 students or so) and CS majors like myself were indeed required to take humanities courses. For me this included a philosophy course, religion course, a course on female literature, a course on fictional literature, and three theatre arts courses. I attended for 2 years (transfer from a community college) and had an otherwise regular sized course load. I currently work at a $BigTechCorp.
Still, I wonder if either the quantity or the quality is too low.
My university was particularly known for its well-rounded, humanities-friendly culture. But in my own experience, I only had one humanities class that I really felt like I learned things in. It was titled "Great Texts" - we read excerpts from The Iliad, Augustine's Confessions, Nicomachean Ethics, Plato's Republic, and others along the same lines - and most of the course was spent having engaging, open discussions about the readings. It had a major impact on my inner life and I wish I'd had time to take some other classes like that.
My other "humanities courses" included:
- "Political Science" - rote memorization of how the United States' government works with very little analysis or discussion
- Psychology/Sociology, which were somewhat interesting but pretty straightforwardly scientific/memorization-heavy
Those classes at my uni you could get an a by signing your name. They were historically diluted to make them easy for people with difficult majors, and in the process lost most of their teaching value.
