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I haven't looked into the Equifax hack, but plenty of highly competent programmers have music degrees. Rich Hickey for example. (source: https://gist.github.com/harfangk/f98e627f7567b7b5741fe0c239b...)

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The only interesting thing about this non-issue is that people brought it up without realizing how they were embarrassing themselves. Talk about a middlebrow dismissal.

I think there's a real issue about the resources that are brought to bear on information security, and what we need to do to get more traction on it, but focusing people's academic background is a misleading way to try to talk about that.

Those are two completely different things.

It couldn't be more ignorant to think that a music degree suggests anything about someone's technical competence (other than maybe a weak positive signal of intellectual breadth). One expects that from media outlets but to see it crop up on HN was shocking. Among people who ought to know better, I can't imagine a stronger indicator of small-mindedness.

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