Excellent point, and my experience is similar. My degree is in philosophy. Already knew programming before high school, and my hobby computer work kept those skills up to date while I was focusing on other stuff - "unrelated" stuff like music, art, foreign languages, English, literature, history - these are things that made it easy for me to relate to people who weren't programmers (for example, everyone else in a company outside IT).

While the cynic in me might say you just need to keep up with American Idol and an occasional Fox news broadcast to be able to chitchat with most Americans... I'm not feeling that cynical tonight ;) I'm certainly no expert on any of those subjects I studied in college, but I'm also not afraid of them either.

For me, philosophy was a way of developing my critical thinking and logic skills (which I already had from programming at an early age) outside of computers and seeing how to apply them constructively to a wide range of topics/issues (religion, law/politics, ethic, etc). Taking even more computer science and progamming courses in university would have bored me to death (well, it started to when I tried it).