From a [flagged][dead] comment: > This is not an economic move for the company. I'm not at all sure I agree with you on this. I've worked for quite a few year

From a [flagged][dead] comment: > This is not an economic move for the company. I'm not at all sure I agree with you on this. I've worked for quite a few years as a software engineer in banking. At one of the companies where I worked, we had an intentional policy of taking people from non-technical roles (such as "telephone support") and giving them opportunities to move within the company to technical roles... sometimes QA, sometimes development roles. It is certainly true that these people were less productive for the first year or so than if we had hired a new graduate. And these people rarely (I can't think of any examples) became our algorithm experts who led the way in optimizing the scaling of large systems. But in my opinion, it was a HUGELY successful program. I mean, it was nice that the people who went through this program had a strong company loyalty. And it sure didn't hurt the morale in roles like telephone support to see some of their former colleagues entering a programming career. But what I really mean is that these people made some of our best developers. Because you need a mix of different skills as a developer. Sometimes you need someone who knows the latest algorithms or tools for optimizing performance or choosing the best new language to build in. But far more frequently, what you really need is someone who knows the business problem and can communicate about it clearly in the customer's own language. A project nudged into right direction to meet poorly expressed but still important business needs is easily worth thousands of developer-hours of work. And understanding of the business is what these people had, in spades. So, perhaps Ms. Lustig brings important skills that complement her developer role. I'm going to go out on a limb here and suggest that perhaps she knows a LOT more about UI design than the average developer. She may also know a lot about the company and its needs. And these are VERY valuable things for a developer to know. (The flagged comment ALSO contained some completely unwarranted -- and unsubstantiated -- sexist assumptions which I think are better ignored than disputed.)