Between the famous "whenever I fire a linguist..." quote and the "fuck computational linguistics" meme, I would be hesitant to reveal my linguistics background in a interview.
I wouldn't worry about it too much. It was a different time back then, when work was mainly guided by linguistic theory. I think that linguistic background is a plus.
The quote (maybe not his) means that linguists used to ignore actual language usage.
"Linguistic theory is concerned primarily with an ideal speaker-listener, in a completely homogeneous speech-community, who knows its (the speech community's) language perfectly and is unaffected by such grammatically irrelevant conditions as memory limitations, distractions, shifts of attention and interest, and errors (random or characteristic) in applying his knowledge of this language in actual performance." ~Chomsky,1965
"Linguistic theory is concerned primarily with an ideal speaker-listener, in a completely homogeneous speech-community, who knows its (the speech community's) language perfectly and is unaffected by such grammatically irrelevant conditions as memory limitations, distractions, shifts of attention and interest, and errors (random or characteristic) in applying his knowledge of this language in actual performance." ~Chomsky,1965