Non-CS/EE hackers?
donw: I may not be the type of person you're looking for, as I started with programming when I was a kid.  Then again, I decided that being a geek was 'uncool' after grade school, and didn't really start hacking on stuff again until the end of high school.In college, I got two degrees, one in Math, the other in Japanese, and while there are some areas where I feel a bit behind-the-curve, overall I think that not getting a CS/EE degree was the right decision, for two reasons.One, because a lot of CS programs focus on writing code to satisfy textbook exercises, rather than in solving real-world problems.  While I'm sure the experience of implementing quicksort in Java is useful at some level, it's a hell of a lot less important in the startup world than having experience in solving practical problems in limited amounts of time.Especially when the solutions to those problems aren't 'known'.Two, because my college experiences were shaped by a mixture of math and language-learning, I didn't develop a case of correctness paralysis, which is a big problem with CS people, in my experience.  They get very stuck on whether or not problems are provably correct, have totally known behavior, and so on, rather than just thinking about the problem a bit, implementing something that works well enough, and then improving it, which is much more an engineering mindset than a CS one.