[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”.

[throwaway2037]

From the tone of your post, I assume that you are a ChemE who works with CompSci folks. If what you say is true, why haven't ChemEs moved into the space and taken over? Software dev pays much better than ChemE.

[jandrewrogers]

Almost all of the chemical engineers I know do work in software, mostly for the money. The skillset translates to computer science relatively seamlessly. Chemical engineering is essentially computer science where you swapped atoms for bits, but far more difficult because there are only distributed systems and the background error rate is always noticeably non-zero.

I studied chemical engineering after I was already working in software, so I did it backward.

[infinite8s]

Did you study chemical engineering knowing it's applicability to software engineering?

Your observation is interesting because early ideas in object oriented design were likewise inspired by biological robustness in the face of a non-zero background error rate (see any of Alan Kay's early writings, and his Turing lecture). I wonder if half of a CS degree shouldn't also involve basic chemeng and bioeng.

[whatever1]

Because if you need a systems designer / architect you will look for traditional credentials in the field. It’s the same reason that computer scientists cannot break into pharma despite the fact that they would really fit with the data infrastructure & processing challenges they face.

Ultimately it is all about how strict the hiring pipeline is to the credentials vs potential.

[insane_dreamer]

My D got her degree in ChemE from a top eng school was hired out of college by a big sw firm and is full time swe 5 years in (by choice).

[aragilar]

Because they want to do ChemE rather than CompSci more than they care about their pay?

[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.

[SJC_Hacker]

You may as well say graph theory had its origins in Ancient Rome when they built the road network.

Most trace it back to Euler when he considered the problem of Seven Bridges of Konigsberg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_Bridges_of_K%C3%B6nigsbe...

[fooker]

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