Most hiring is based on the idea that it is far worse to employ a bad candidate than reject a good one - which favors an approach of choosing fairly arbitrary filters to whittle down the mountain of applications that any decent job has these days to a manageable quantity.
Requiring a degree is popular as it is an easy to implement filter rather than any correlation with ability. (Note that question of whether a CS degree is relevant or not is an other question entirely - I'm a CS graduate and I think the maths & theory heavy course I did is irrelevant to 98% of development jobs even if it has been pretty useful for me).
I'm a CS graduate and I think the maths & theory heavy course I did is irrelevant to 98% of development jobs even if it has been pretty useful for me
There are a few tidbits from your education that will save you from serious egg on your face. (See my other post this thread.) This is not just theoretical. I've seen a company suffer major embarrassment because software sold to Fortune 500 companies was written by programmers who thought, "all that poppycock about race conditions/transactions is just academic hot air."
Absolutely - the course I did in Concurrent Systems as part of my degree was of huge long term value because of the excellent set of mathematical abstractions it made be familiar with (Petri Nets and CSP in particular).
IMHO Computer Science courses deliver value through proving a knowledge of abstractions of software and hardware systems. These formal abstractions remain applicable pretty much forever whereas knowledge of particular technologies are of passing value.
[NB My hardwired knowledge of vi commands, Unix system calls and C was merely pleasant side effects of my CS degree not an end in itself]
I, myself, did not do computer science at university (I did civil engineering), and regret that a great deal. Not only does learning this stuff make you considerably more hire-able, it also enables solution of problems more sanely than a naive approach.
The real thing I feel that I miss is not being able to recognise where known algorithms/data structures could help out, something I'm working on fixing.
Requiring a degree is popular as it is an easy to implement filter rather than any correlation with ability. (Note that question of whether a CS degree is relevant or not is an other question entirely - I'm a CS graduate and I think the maths & theory heavy course I did is irrelevant to 98% of development jobs even if it has been pretty useful for me).