Why Equifax’s error wasn’t hiring someone with a music degree

engadget.com

7 points·RKoutnik··5 comments

I learned yesterday that Mudge's degree is from the Berklee College of Music (a top school for music performance):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peiter_Zatko

So I think that's a great example of how someone with a music degree could potentially be one of the world's top infosec experts. (Also I believe Chris Palmer, who used to be my boss and currently works on the Google Chrome security team, has a degree in linguistics but would probably have been rather tempted by a music degree considering his huge passion for music performance.)

I think it's worth considering what really does make for good infosec qualifications, but it's easy to see that it's not necessarily a university degree. (Also considering how many leading infosec experts didn't finish university.)

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...)

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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