The conclusion to Toby Young’s piece in the Telegraph makes an interesting point ‘Latin recruiters’ might want to make use of:

I’ve done some cursory research about Zuckerberg since seeing the film and, needless to say, he’s not the cold-blooded killer he’s portrayed as. Far from being a Howard Hughes character, he has a long-standing girlfriend who he’s been with since before he created Facebook. He may be rich, but he’s not selfish – he’s been happy to dilute his own share of Facebook to 24%, sharing the wealth with several of his old college roommates, and earlier this year he donated $100 million to the Newark public school system. My favourite fact about him is that he’s a Classicist, having studied the Classics at Ardsley High School and then immersed himself in Latin when he transferred to Philips Exeter Academy.

Next time some small-minded, utilitarian educationalist asks me why I want to make Latin compulsory at the West London Free School, and questions its “relevance” to the contemporary world, I’m going to point to Mark Zuckerberg. I have no doubt he would have created Facebook whether he’d met Saverin or not. But without a solid grounding in Latin, with its clear, logical structure that’s so similar to the language of computers, he probably wouldn’t have got to first base.

via After seeing The Social Network, I’m now a huge fan of Mark Zuckerberg – Telegraph Blogs.

… quibus rebus cognitis, it seems to add some auctoritas of sorts to something mentioned on the Classics list a few weeks ago:

Startups like ONEsite often cast a wide net when hiring–especially in Oklahoma City. “Because of our location, we didn’t necessarily have the largest pool of available technical talent to draw from, so we decided to hire our own people and train them to write computer code,” says founder Thad Martin, 28. “Some of our best developers have been classics majors and physicists with no previous programming experience. They were able to apply their knowledge of other ‘languages’ to think structurally and logically.”

Top Tips: 10 Companies Share What They Look For In Nontraditional Hires

Perhaps we should be pushing the ubergeek potential of Latin … if we aren’t already.