Tommy Collison on the benefits of hiring coders without a CS degree

10k hours of real experience would equate to 5 years of professional programming and in my opinion would likely make one an intermediate programmer at least and likely make most education credentials moot.

This however is vastly different from the case of a kid programming from the age of 12 and then attending a bootcamp and claiming 10k hours of experience.

In that case, I would assume the candidate is likely to have no "real" experience in my opinion and I would not hire them over someone with a CS degree.

Yes I realize that there are plenty of counter examples of child prodigies but I sometimes need to review 100 applications a week and unless an application from a self taught programmer with bootcamp credentials and nothing else came with an impressive letter of recommendation, I would round file it.

However if an application came in from someone with 5 real years under their belt I could not care less what their educational background was.