[dmansen]

I do lots of recruiting / hiring at my job. I use a sliding scale. If you have no CS degree: have you written applications from scratch? Is your experience diverse or have you spent 5 years repeatedly writing the same Rails app?

On the other side, if you do have a CS degree, have you written application code before? If not, I want to see that you can apply your CS fundamentals to practical business problems.

Of course there are people without a degree who are phenomenal programmers, and people with one who can't write FizzBuzz! Is anyone arguing against this? When we're screening people we need some way of gauging your skill level. A degree is one indicator, practical experience is another.