Well then why did you say this:

>There isn't anything unusual about professional programmers having a degree in maths or physics rather than CS. At least in my experience it was pretty close to an equal split.

You said explicitly math and physics degrees vs CS degrees. And you previously said the best programmers tended to have math, or physics degrees or something similar.

This isn't me being pedantic, it was the entire context of the discussion.

The point is that you are prone to confirmation bias as evidenced by your belief that it's close to an equal split. Your mental model is overrepresenting people with physics and math degrees likely because it confirms your belief that they are better programmers.

>So a typical 15-developer team would be 9 with CS degrees, 3 with no degree, 1 with an engineering degree, 1 with maths/science and 1 other. The non-CS folk are not exactly rare unicorns.

That's not the point, it's that you are more likely to remember the background of the 1 person on a team who has a Math degree because she is relatively rare compared to all of the people with CS degrees. This is a well known and well documented phenomenon. And it's one of the primary reasons that anecdotal evidence, even a large amount of anecdotal evidence is so often wrong.