My wife has a PhD in comparative lit, but she now works in banking. Her PhD gave her a superpower: Reading. She can quickly absorb large amounts of text with abstruse, complex, and subtle distinctions and tell you very nitpicky things about it. She thinks financial/banking regulations are light reading in comparison to the stuff she waded through to get her PhD. (It's also quite surprising: the number of C-level people in banking who have little patience for reading. She's won a number of boardroom battles because she has actually read things.)
what exactly do you mean by literary analysis here? i have (in my opinion) extremely good reading comprehension skills, in that i can read and understand the literal meaning of almost any text (provided i understand the context), and i got an 800 on the critical reading section of the SAT. on the other hand, i can't for the life of me read a book and pick out any of the major themes without having them spoon-fed to me. i was always terrified when i was expected to have my own opinion about a text to use as the topic for a paper.
There are a lot of people out there who have memorized how to implement k-means and PCA but would absolutely struggle to understand what they're actually doing or interpret the results in a meaningful way. A HUGE part of being a data scientist is presenting information in a useful way. That's why PhDs are favored because with their experience having to write grants to get funding for their research they're exactly the type of people that can take a naive problem, work it to a result, and then sit in front of a board room of non-technical people and explain why their result was worth the money that was given to them.