I wrote and open sourced a program to print guitar tablature in postscript (so it ran on our apple laserwriter instead of on a pc; as a phd student in the early 90s our computers were severely underpowered, but also I wanted to make it portable from Suns to Macs to Win 3.1). It could also process a lot of ascii tablature and turn it into nicer copy - this was what I wanted it for as I was trying to print out tab from OLGA using less paper, and when you scale down ascii tab it just leaves blank space to the side. (I got a mail from someone in New Zealand to say he used this code to publish a book of 5-string banjo music, as it was the only thing he could find that handled different numbers of strings)
Anyway, fast forward a year and I interviewed for a programming job with British Telecom. This project came up in conversation and the interviewer got super interested, and I landed the job. Then it turned out that almost everyone this boss hired was a musician of some kind-including a keyboard player for a chart-topping band (he's back touring with them now), a bass player, a professional saxophonist career changer, a singer in a band... he ran a weekly jam session after hours. So I really think it was the guitar playing that got me hired.
And no, it didn't relate to the job, at all. My phd involved parallel programming on transputers in C, and as it happened, the guy they sat me next to on my first day also had a phd involving C programming on parallel machines. And they got us to write Visual Basic for the next 6 months.
Anyway, fast forward a year and I interviewed for a programming job with British Telecom. This project came up in conversation and the interviewer got super interested, and I landed the job. Then it turned out that almost everyone this boss hired was a musician of some kind-including a keyboard player for a chart-topping band (he's back touring with them now), a bass player, a professional saxophonist career changer, a singer in a band... he ran a weekly jam session after hours. So I really think it was the guitar playing that got me hired.
And no, it didn't relate to the job, at all. My phd involved parallel programming on transputers in C, and as it happened, the guy they sat me next to on my first day also had a phd involving C programming on parallel machines. And they got us to write Visual Basic for the next 6 months.