I ask because it is very unlikely an employer will straight up tell you that this was the reason.
And it’s about to get worse. You could get a job without a degree or any relevant experience in the 90’s because there were so many to be had and so few degrees to be found. Once you were in, you could stay in by virtue of your experience. This isn’t the case any more; it’s about to be impossible to get an entry level development job without a relevant degree. I think sometimes HN commenters forget that there’s a whole generation of kids in high school today who didn’t work for .com startups throughout the 90’s…
I think the biggest problem our industry has is tying internships to 'enroled in college or university'. Eliminate that requirement, and now people have a path in. Software development is a somewhere between a trade and an amateur mathematics program.
Hmm, I wonder about that actually. From what I've heard (hearsay, really), for a normal application Google and Microsoft won't look at it without a degree. But maybe they don't really look at it anyway. The only big company that I've heard doesn't really care is Nvidia, so props to them I suppose, but again, I heard that from one guy who's working there who might not have been entirely honest about prior contact with them, so I really can't say for sure. It would definitely be interesting though.
We are seeing the big tech companies more than ever use algorithmic puzzle questions, and startups using "culture fit" as easy go-to filtration systems.
But, I imagine education might be an even simpler filter if labor supply keeps growing. It certainly makes for easy automated filtering if a person doesn't have a top-20 school listed on their resume.
That seems like a very weak hiring strategy.
I'd imagine the top 10% of CS majors at a mid-tier school might be better than the bottom 10% at a top-tier school.
Also, college rankings can include all sorts of factors like endowments that might only be weakly correlated with the quality of the education, which itself is probably very difficult to measure.
Plus you're going to have a hiring bias against self-learners or those that can't afford a top 20 school.
A quick quiz or sample of prior work is a much better filter than a college name.
Education is a shitty filtration system. Work-examples and/or skill-demonstration based interviews like the ones used for programmers are much better. The only reason that so many other industries rely on education is that they don't have as good ways of testing the actual skills of job applicants (and/or because testing doesn't scale that well - e.g. you can give a coding test to every programmer, but can't give a "surgery test" to every doctor).