Tech columnist Chris Matyszczyk describes what happened after Microsoft's senior cloud advocate tweeted "Hire folks with non-traditional paths to tech." Thomas Zeman, whose Twitter bio declared he's "scaling pods at daytime, working on a docker based raspberry pi router at nighttime," mused in reply: "Depends a bit what tech you are talking about. When doing machine learning for cancer recognition on medical images I am sorry but dont believe baristas will crack it...."

Oddly, Zeman's comment received what might be termed a reaction....

In wandered David Brunelle... "Hi Thomas!" he said. "I'm a vp of engineering at Starbucks. I started my career as a Starbucks barista. I have no college degree. Most of my early-in-career training came from the Navy. All non-traditional. And I lead one of the biggest digital payments platforms in the world...."

Here's Twitterer Ew, Ryan: "I've worked as a delivery driver, tuxedo salesman, sandwich maker, gas station attendant, server, a few summers as a plumbing apprentice, and I could go on and on... but now I've worked at Google, Twitter and TikTok. Don't confuse past work histories with future capabilities."

Or this from someone with the adorable Twitter handle @SecuritySphynx: "Gatekeeping is a bad look. 4y ago I was stamping envelopes/answering phones for $12/hour. Now I'm engineering security solutions with some of the worlds largest orgs Almost no one started in tech and never did anything else before. Check your classism at the door, please...."
The article ultimately asks how many tech companies (and their HR departments) "persist in seeking those with a particular qualification and a particular past history? How many think there's a tech type?" But at least the Twitter thread provoked this clarifying correction from the pod-scaling, router-builder who'd started all the reactions.

"I totally believe anyone can learn and master anything (including Baristas of course) without any doubt. The point is that mastering things will take a lot of time..."

The Washington Post reports that the "supervolcano" beneath Yellowstone National Park (which, thankfully, did not kill us all in 2004, or in 2008 ) may be more dangerous when it does erupt than anyone realized until recently. Scientists have today published a paper documenting their discovery of an even larger, deeper pool of magma below the already huge reservoir near the surface. From the article: On Thursday, a team from the University of Utah published a study, in the journal Science, that for the first time offers a complete diagram of the plumbing of the Yellowstone volcanic system. The new report fills in a missing link of the system. It describes a large reservoir of hot rock, mostly solid but with some melted rock in the mix, that lies beneath a shallow, already-documented magma chamber. The newly discovered reservoir is 4.5 times larger than the chamber above it. There's enough magma there to fill the Grand Canyon. The reservoir is on top of a long plume of magma that emerges from deep within the Earth's mantle. ... “This is like a giant conduit. It starts down at 1,000 kilometers. It's a pipe that starts down in the Earth," said Robert Smith, emeritus professor of geophysics at the University of Utah and a co-author of the new paper. ... The next major, calderic eruption could be within the boundaries of the park, northeast of the old caldera. “If you have this crustal magma system that is beneath the pre-Cambrian rocks, eventually if you get enough fluid in that system, enough magma, you can create another caldera, another set of giant explosions," Smith said. "There’s no reason to think it couldn’t continue that same process and repeat that process to the northeast.”

An anonymous reader writes "The Huffington Post reports, 'Michael Hayden, former director of the National Security Agency, said Sunday that he used to describe leaker Edward Snowden as a "defector," ... "I think there's an English word that describes selling American secrets to another government, and I do think it's treason," Hayden said ... Some members of Congress have also ... accused him of an act of treason. Hayden said his view of Snowden has grown harsher in recent weeks after reports that Snowden is seeking asylum in Germany and Brazil in exchange for assisting their investigations into NSA programs. Hayden said the NSA is "infinitely" weaker as a result of Snowden's leaks. "This is the most serious hemorrhaging of American secrets in the history of American espionage," he said. "What Snowden is revealing ... is the plumbing," he added later. "He's revealing how we acquire this information. It will take years, if not decades, for us to return to the position that we had prior to his disclosures."' — More in the Face the Nation video and transcript, including discussion of the recent legal decisions, and segments with whistleblower Thomas Drake, Snowden legal adviser Jesselyn Radack, and Washington Post reporter Barton Gellman who recently interviewed Snowden."

Niels Provos would like you to help create the perfect lure for crackers. In the style of similar challenges presented by the Honeynet Project, Provos, a doctoral candidate at CITI (a research institute at the University of Michigan) has announced a public competition for contributions to his honeyd project, which the project page describes as "a small daemon that creates virtual hosts on a network." Honeyd does more than that terse description implies, though: read on to see how you can contribute to creative cracker snaring.

From somehere just off the beaten path of SciFi, programming and encryption reviews, Kevin Whilden of Your Planet Earth submitted this review of Natural Capitalism, a book aimed at reconciling nature lovers with free market enthusiasts. The book's basic ideas may be old hat to many libertarians and other free-marketeers, but are phrased in way that seems aimed at a fairly conventional lay audience. How do you feel about the connections he draws between open source software and the eco-economy? What is the best economic atmosphere for a healthy environment, and is it also the best one for free software? How realistic is the Rocky Mountain Institute's analysis?