It is a good time to be a history graduate (as I am) in Silicon Valley. For years, the tech industry shunned those who chose to study the liberal arts. Venture capitalist Marc Andreessen summed up the attitude in 2012, claiming that the average graduate with a degree in English would “end up working in a shoe store”.

Now, though, the Valley is realising that there is value in knowing more about the world than bits and bytes, maths and machine learning. Tracy Chou, a software developer who has worked at Pinterest and Quora, wrote recently that when she studied engineering at Stanford, she thought that was all she needed to learn. But when she left a world “circumscribed by lesson plans, problem sets and programming assignments”, she realised she needed more context to engage with the impact of technology on society.

Chou’s first job at Quora was to build a “block” button to prevent harassment on the question-and-answer site. That led to debates on the importance of free speech vs community comfort — challenges that Facebook, Twitter and YouTube are still struggling with.

In a post on Quartz, Chou said she became embarrassed about her previous “condescending attitude” towards the humanities. She now wishes she had been taught to think critically about the world: “how to identify and interrogate privilege, power structures, structural inequality and injustice” — ideas that could have helped put her engineering work in context.

My own university education could not have been less technical. The closest contact I had with technology was writing essays in Microsoft Word, which then had to be printed out in a basement computer room to be marked in pen. But my study of colonialism in Indochina did teach me about privilege and power structures, and what I read about the French Resistance in the second world war taught me about injustice and human behaviour.

Scott Hartley, a venture capitalist, believes we need to combine my kind of education with Chou’s: the “fuzzies” — his term for liberal arts majors — must work closely with “techies”. In The Fuzzy and the Techie: Why the Liberal Arts Will Rule the Digital World, published earlier this year, Hartley criticises fellow VCs Andreessen and Vinod Khosla, who argued that a liberal arts education limits “the dimensionality of your thinking” because students are less familiar with mathematical models and have worse statistical understanding.

In fact, fuzzies are already flooding into the tech workforce. LinkedIn data from 2015 show that between 2010 and 2013, the growth of liberal arts majors entering the tech industry outpaced that of computer science and engineering majors by 10 per cent. Internet or software companies — often those facing big real-world challenges, from detecting terrorist propaganda to helping users in a natural disaster — are keen on hiring these grads, according to the professional social network.

Hartley gives many examples of where an understanding of psychology, philosophy and sociology has helped build successful companies. Despite the cult of the engineer in Silicon Valley, many tech chief executives benefited from a broader education: Susan Wojcicki at YouTube majored in history and literature; Brian Chesky at Airbnb has a bachelors degree in fine arts; and even Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg studied psychology alongside computer science.

I believe we need the humanities equivalent of coding schools — those popular intensive courses that teach programming. Liberal arts camps would give techies a taste of what they missed at college — perhaps even with reading lists themed around the most urgent problems their companies face.

It is no coincidence that Chou is a founding adviser to Project Include, a non-profit devoted to accelerating diversity in the tech industry. The sector needs to embrace liberal arts graduates as part of its pursuit of diversity. Not only is it too young, white and male — it lacks the diversity of thought engendered by studying the great thinkers of yesterday. And that doesn’t just mean Steve Jobs.