This has also been my experience...of more than twenty years standing. One of the things that makes technical writing palatable is the fact that most of the engineers I have worked with are easy-going, intelligent, and sometimes interesting people. Very few nerds actually. You can even find some bridge players :)
I don't know if there's a correlation between music and cryptography, but I have been told that the best pre-programming major is music, and I have also heard that classics majors (you know the ones who can parse a sentence by Cicero) are absolutely terrific at debugging programs.
Joanna