Now, I'm seeing things from the production programming/systems administration side. But my impression was that physics people use large clusters of Linux boxes

Now, I'm seeing things from the production programming/systems administration side. But my impression was that physics people use large clusters of Linux boxes in college, and thus have practical experience when dealing with that sort of thing in industry. From my perspective, I'd much rather have a physics major who has large-scale systems administration experience and linux experience than a CS major who used java and windows. (But again, I'm not working on "hard CS" - I'm keeping clusters running, with bondo and bailing wire, if need be.) That, and they tend to be bright sorts who are able to break down problems into something that can be reduced to code. My impression is that the standards as far as intelligence goes are higher in the physics department than in the CS department, but that might just be that where I work, I don't get to see the best output of the CS department.