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Maybe her liberal arts background gave her an advantage? There must be thousands of people with more or less identical world class CS background at Google. They might consider having someone with a different perspective on things a good thing. Even if you are a programmer, having a big picture understanding of things beyond code and algorithms can be a huge advantage.

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Agreed. I mentioned something like this in a comment the other day- a liberal arts background can be a massive help to one's ability to function as a programmer, and when I was hiring programmers at my old job, I routinely found that candidates who had spent some significant time outside of the CS building tended to work out better than less well-rounded candidates.

There's a company in the UK that has been profiled on HN before-- their name escapes me now-- but they are famous for hiring Oxbridge liberal arts graduates and training them in computer science and software development. Anybody remember who I'm talking about?

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