[skadamou]

I know someone with a PhD in biochemistry who was hired at Intel from a cancer research lab... I'm sure he sold his chemistry background well but I always thought that was an odd hire. Maybe there are just so few qualified PhDs that they'll happily take folks from adjacent fields?

[whatever1]

Most of the senior leadership of Amazon in the early days were a bunch of randos from a formal credential standpoint. A car mechanic leading aws engineering, a musician running logistics, a chemical engineer optimizing the network etc .

Hedge funds also hire physicists and mechanical engineers

[donavanm]

Your phrasing _drastically_ undersells the actual relevant background and experience there:

James hamilton the “mechanic” … with EE & CS degrees and time at ibm and ms. Dave Clark the “musician” (undergrad) … and an MBA focused on logistics. Jeff wilke the “chemist” … who worked on process optimization at honeywell and supply chains at aderesen.

So sure, might as well say DeSantis is an SDE Intern figuring out software deployments, Vosshall is an amateur aircraft EE, or marc brooker is some foreign radar engineer.

Signed, some newpaper dude who was an AWS PE doing edge networking and operations.

[jandrewrogers]

Chemical engineers are so good at distributed systems that it is almost a trope at this point. It is their specialty. Their entire discipline is optimizing aggregate throughput in decentralized systems with minimal coordination.

It maps 1:1 with the computer science but chemical engineering as a discipline has more robust design heuristics that don’t really have common equivalents in software even though they are equally applicable. Chemical engineering is extremely allergic to any brittleness in architecture, that’s a massive liability, whereas software tends to just accept it because “what’s the worst that could happen”.

[dapperdrake]

That sounds surprisingly non-random.

Graph theory originated in Chemistry. Not Computer Science.

Musicians know harmonics and indirectly lots of cyclical travel stuff. And waves.

The good car mechanics I know are scary smart.

[fooker]

Any good laboratory chemist can be trained to work in semiconductor research. The tools and jargon are largely similar.