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It seems like most people on thread say one thing, but the statistics seem to say something else.

http://phys.org/news/2014-03-hire-google-companies-bad-idea....

86% of people at google have college degrees. I guess 14% is a pretty high number, but it also says a vast majority have a college degree.

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Hacker News doesn't represent the world of programming as a whole. In many companies, developers are hired in the same way that many other office workers are. The required degree is needed, the necessary experience on top. For larger companies that don't deal primarily in tech, this is their HR policy, and it exists for all roles.

There's no contradiction here. I'd argue that the correlation noted is because knowledge workers as a whole tend to have college degrees, and Google employs a lot of knowledge workers. The number does not imply that Google actively selects against people without college degrees at a 6:1 ratio.

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