Scott, a onetime interior design major turned information architect, is speaking only metaphorically, of course. But he says learning about "critical adjacencies of space" -- such as putting restrooms near conference rooms so that meeting attendees can quickly duck in and out -- carries over to Web design, where the "critical adjacencies" are of information.

Scott's migration from architecture into the technology industry isn't atypical: Talk to a group of tech workers, and you may find that the majority of them drifted into the industry from a completely different discipline.

The Web industry is creating jobs at a clip, and many of those jobs are going to college graduates without academic computing experience -- and people who skipped college altogether. No one has taken a formal count of these two groups, but they haven't gone unnoticed. And their success raises the question of whether a computer science education, or even any higher education, is a prerequisite to competing in the high-tech job market.

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