There are a few places I've seen that try to formally bring in "smart people who didn't get a CS degree." Microsoft has or had an "apprentice program" aimed at

There are a few places I've seen that try to formally bring in "smart people who didn't get a CS degree." Microsoft has or had an "apprentice program" aimed at smart people who never happened to pick up a CS degree. There's a little bit about it here http://microsoftjobsblog.com/blog/microspotting/ http://microsoftjobsblog.com/blog/microspotting/ I can't find any mention of it on the Microsoft jobs site. Maybe it's become a casualty of the recession. From what I can tell it started around 2006, so it would not have affected Zeke. Berkeley used to have a "computer science re-entry program" aimed specifically at people who wanted to go to graduate school in CS but who had a degree in something other than CS, like, say music or history or whatever. The idea was to take people, then help them learn what they needed to know in a year or two, and finally help them navigate the grad school admissions process. A secondary goal was to increase the number of women and minorities in CS grad school. This worked well from what I understand, but a combination of funding cuts and Prop 209 killed it. http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1008940 http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1008940