Thank you for your thoughtful reply - you’re right, there are some interesting parallels! :) Perhaps the idea is that a greater knowledge of the formal or abstr

Thank you for your thoughtful reply - you’re right, there are some interesting parallels! :) Perhaps the idea is that a greater knowledge of the formal or abstracted aspects of c.s. lends a kind of long-term versatility or adaptability to candidates for large companies/an almost academic rigour in c.s. research for longer term developments... Employees may eventually move between different roles, collaboration may happen between more disparate/diverse areas of the company, or people may move up into managerial positions where they may have to cross-over/communicate many focuses/areas of business or developmental planning - therefore their thinking may eventually become more abstracted from the day-to-day practise? (as a music producer, if you understand how music is put together /psychoacoustics/some physics it certainly helps enormously with all sorts of stuff - although again, as it is an artform rather than a science of efficiency, knowing the accepted solution isn’t always an advantage I suppose - though you can always choose to ignore those rules…). If it became important to be able to document/systematise/migrate/publish a codebase then an ability to break down and communicate what you have done on a formal level would be an obvious advantage I guess? On the other hand, a formalised system, if too rigidly adhered to, might preclude a freshness of approach or openness to different ways of doing things/hacking/combining aspects from other fields/cultures etc... Sometimes the over-specialism that you get in big organisations might kill certain kinds of innovation or the ability to ‘think outside the box’/see a bigger picture? …You could maybe make some sort of a comparison with session musicians who are (/were before the more traditional recording industry kind of died a bit of a techno-death at least! :) often expected to be very versatile, to read notation and pick things up very quickly, work in various sized ensembles/ad hoc groups etc. but were often (sometimes unfairly) criticised for being ‘bland’/sim.? …but then you might have some jazz musicians (…crossing over with many great session players…) who might have a deeper and simultaneously more intuitive understanding of music theory than some amazing classical musicians (who have the edge perhaps in immense attention to detail and consistency of performance…) …I wish I knew more about programming/computer science to be able to better discuss it! :) …I’m fascinated by the parallels between languages and music also - I guess programming languages are another variety of symbolic representation (like maths?) …I just wonder what the parallels really are between evoking emotion/promoting cold efficiency at performing a task, but I guess a lot of modern programming actually comes closer to design in a sense?(/production/library music heheh) …all primarily involve communicating with others/(the ‘other’ as machine?) and problem solving/logical resolution to a greater/lesser extent I suppose… (…even a ‘star’ has a panoply of people collected around them - producers, engineers, promoters, managers, distributors etc. and other musicians - some trained…)