I'm a college dropout who's been in a position where I've had to interview people and make hiring decisions. I always hire based on who I'd most like to work with. Sometimes that candidate has a degree from a very prestigious university, other times they don't, but I always hire the person who I think I'll learn the most from or whom I think will add the most value to the company. Grades and the school you went to never tell me those things, it's your interview and personal projects that tell me that.

Yes. The projects someone has done is more useful, but only as a source of topics to ask questions about. I keep on running into recent grads from prestigious University of California system schools with 3.75+ GPAs who don't know basic things about pointers, who can't concretely specify a design for even a small subsystem, and who seem to have only ever glued libraries together with a high level language, nothing more.

I introduce a 2 element cycle in a dataset, and ask how we can detect such things, and have repeatedly gotten an if-clause that would only detect the 2 elements. Then I ask about a 3 element cycle, and I've even gotten another if-clause to detect the 3 elements as an answer multiple times.

What in the world!?

then you're one of the only ones