When you're hiring someone who's completed an undergraduate degree in CS you have lots more information
At the CV level:
1) A university which has filtered out bad candidates for you, which university/degree you got is a good quality filter
2) An undergraduate thesis which has been chosen by the individual, both the topic and the complexity are good indicators of the candidate (did they build a website or did they implement a new GC algorithm)
3) Internships (did they spend the summer work at McDs or Google)
4) Open source / spare time projects
At the interview level:
1) An ability to write code, you can directly test if they're capable of taking a problem and turning it into a solution (aka fizzbuzz). This is a very distinct skills and no-ones come up with a good way of predicting ability in it despite numerous attempts.
2) An understanding of abstract data structures, again it's very hard to test if someone can understand concepts like call stacks and hashtables without being able to test those things directly.
That's a hell of a lot more information than you'll have with 18 year olds or even with humanities majors (incidentally I assume you classifying math as a humanity was in error).
Of those firms I know who hire non-CS grads to do programming most of them require some experience with programming (which tends to cover most maths, physics and engineering students). Very very few companies try to hire completely unexperienced programmers.
At the CV level:
1) A university which has filtered out bad candidates for you, which university/degree you got is a good quality filter
2) An undergraduate thesis which has been chosen by the individual, both the topic and the complexity are good indicators of the candidate (did they build a website or did they implement a new GC algorithm)
3) Internships (did they spend the summer work at McDs or Google)
4) Open source / spare time projects
At the interview level:
1) An ability to write code, you can directly test if they're capable of taking a problem and turning it into a solution (aka fizzbuzz). This is a very distinct skills and no-ones come up with a good way of predicting ability in it despite numerous attempts.
2) An understanding of abstract data structures, again it's very hard to test if someone can understand concepts like call stacks and hashtables without being able to test those things directly.
That's a hell of a lot more information than you'll have with 18 year olds or even with humanities majors (incidentally I assume you classifying math as a humanity was in error).
Of those firms I know who hire non-CS grads to do programming most of them require some experience with programming (which tends to cover most maths, physics and engineering students). Very very few companies try to hire completely unexperienced programmers.