My jobs have mostly been at startups, so maybe it is an uphill battle at big corporations like you mentioned, but I'd be surprised if lack of degree was a sticking point for a talented coder trying for a job at Apple/Google/Facebook.
Google contacted me for a position years ago. I later found out they hire only 1 of 1000 applicants. I talked to the recruiter (before I went back to college) and she said most Google programmers not only have Bachelors, many of them had masters degrees and doctorates.
One of the questions involved context switches. I never even heard of context switches again until I went back to school and took my computer organization and architecture class.
> any problems getting coding jobs in silicon valley. It never even came up.
I have been working in IT professionally for over 20 years. Read about what was happening in 2000-2001. In a scenario like that, when startups are going bust, are not being funded, the economy is in a recession and many programmers are employed, having a Bachelors that can get you into a Fortune 500 company that requires it helps.
Also - although I have met CS graduates who can not code, most of the "talented coders" I have met have a college degree. I can count on one hand the ones I can think of who are not (and I include on my hand John Carmack, who I don't even know, but I know he is a talented programmer with a college degree).
In web/app coding, all that matters is what you've done in the last 1-4 years. Anything beyond that is too dated to be relevant.
It's been a highly successful recruiting practice. There are so many brilliant self taught developers that would get overlooked if I only looked at college graduates.
Yes, for the pedantic I know whether qsort() actually implements the quicksort algorithm is implementation defined.