No diploma here - still have recruiters from at least 3 of the 5 messaging me.
Edit: downvoters, care to explain a little? Why would they waste their time on me if they weren't interested in me working there?
Edit: downvoters, care to explain a little? Why would they waste their time on me if they weren't interested in me working there?
And when our team was recruiting experienced candidates (5-10 years or more), at no point we ever cared about their degree or lack thereof (aside from some specialized research positions that typically require graduate degrees). For entry level though, yeah, if you are in your early 20s without much industry experience, it is gonna be much tougher to get hired without a degree.
Also, i don't know when your friend tried to get re-hired and at which level. The whole "we don't care as much about degrees anymore" is a fairly recent thing, I would say 5 or so years. And of course, if your friend only worked at MSFT for a few years, then left to do school, and then tried to come back, they would be probably still shooting for a close-to-entry level position, not a senior. And entry-level without a degree or something else to compensate for it is going to be really tough. Normally it is compensated by either years of experience or something else (side projects, major open-source contribs, etc.), hence why I never saw someone without a degree at entry-level, but plenty who are senior engineers.
As best as I can tell the only time it has hurt me is when I tried to emigrate out of the US and was unable to as some countries require a degree to get a work visa, even with a job offer.
And no one explicitly ever asked, but they did ask for a rather detailed work/education history, and I never claimed to have one.
I really suspect that they SAY they don't care if you have a degree or not, but at the end of the day I think they do.
If your lack of degree was a dealbreaker, they wouldn't go with the interview process to completion. It makes zero sense to waste time and resources on a candidate that you already determined you aren't going to hire. My team had to interview 50+ people just to fill a couple of positions, and every interview is taking away from precious time that could have been spent working on the product. Wasting our time interviewing someone we won't hire due to a lack of degree makes no sense.
Not only it would be wasting our own time, we would also be wasting the candidate's time, and all of it for exactly zero gain. There is no grand conspiracy where FAANG companies interview candidates with no degrees all the way till the end, and then drop them due to the lack of degree, it is just illogical all around.
Basically, if you got an interview, and especially if you got to the onsite rounds, nothing that is on your resume can disqualify you at this point.
The thing is, I was asked to provide certain details after my interview process, like an extremely detailed chronology of my education and work history, explain every single gap greater than 3 weeks, etc. etc.
The fact that this all happened after I rocked my interviews (which was the feedback provided via the recruiter) tells me that yes, it's possible that they wasted everyone's time to interview me and potentially disqualified me on some kind of technicality.
It was an odd experience altogether. I was even invited to spend an afternoon with someone on the team after getting the verbal Ok. Either way, it was interesting experience, but pretty unpleasant through and through. In hindsight, I'm quite glad I didn't get the job, but in principal I didn't like the way the process went.
Yes, you are, it sounds like Google, and I had the same experience with them, except I had a degree.
> I rocked my interviews (which was the feedback provided via the recruiter)
A lot of times, recruiters aren't at liberty to provide truthful and direct feedback. Also, you might have done well overall, but one of the interviewers tanked you. It all depends. You might have gotten a good signal (but not strong on all of them, just "good enough") from all your interviews except one, and on that one you got a strongly negative one. Hiring committee looks at this combination of signals and decides "no". This is really common.
Hiring a bad candidate and having to fire them later is extremely expensive, so the interview process prioritizes decreasing false positives rather than false negatives. Which means that unless they are absolutely certain you are a good fit, it is a pass. But I can pretty much guarantee you that if you got to onsites and then later got declined by the hiring committee, it wasn't your lack of degree that got you passed over.
So, yes, you can get hired at FAANG & friends without a CS degree.
But: I would suggest to always read that as "absolutely go for it, even if you didn't get a degree", not "skip getting a degree, it doesn't make a difference".