One of the best examples I know of is someone we hired at Viaweb, Jonathan Yedidia. http://www.disneyresearch.com/people/jonathan-yedidia/ http://www.disneyres

One of the best examples I know of is someone we hired at Viaweb, Jonathan Yedidia. http://www.disneyresearch.com/people/jonathan-yedidia/ http://www.disneyresearch.com/people/jonathan-yedidia/ He had a PhD in physics and then became a professional chess player (44th in the world IIRC). He hadn't done much programming, but I knew him from high school and figured someone as smart as him could learn to program pretty quickly. Which is exactly what happened. Now he's a CS researcher.