Not really true at all. Having no degree at all may present an obstacle in entering the interview process if you don't have strong experience to make up for it. But once you've entered the process as a candidate, the type or lack of degree will have absolutely no bearing on whether or not you're given an offer. It may be used past the decision phase when the hiring committee is deciding how to level you, but if so that will only be meaningful if they're slotting you for the first two levels or so.
Everything becomes easier with a degree, doubly so with a degree from a top university. But they only use that as a factor in deciding who to interview; all they care about when deciding who to hire is interview performance. Someone without a degree should be optimizing their search by convincing hiring managers or employees to refer them into the process directly, thereby short circuiting the recruiters.
Have you considered the possibility that a degree from a top university could influence an interviewer's report of the candidate's technical proficiency?
During one interview I had at Google, I stumbled when performing addition on base 64 numbers.
Since I don't have a degree, it seems likely that interviewer will write that I have a conceptual deficiency with numeric bases and mathematics.
If I had a degree from CMU and gave an identical performance, they might instead write that I was rusty with numeric bases.
There's also the fact that most of the interviewers have a degree, many from a top 10 university. Hiring people that match their own profile validates their own background which benefits their career, so a self-interested and rational interviewer should rightly tend to give more positive ratings to people with degrees, ideally from institutions similar to theirs.
I think this is relevant at every stage of the interview process. If you sound nervous and don't have a degree, they might think you have a mental disorder, whereas if you have a degree from CMU they might just think that you don't want to disappoint your family.
I feel disadvantaged at every stage of the interview process for not having a degree. I'm sure there's no moment where someone is consciously docking me points or arguing against me with specific reference to the lack of degree. But I do think it's heavily influencing how academic types perceive me, and what they write about me in their report.
This will vary widely based on job function: it may be true for engineers, but it's not true for marketing. From what I hear, at Facebook and google, if you apply for a marketing job, You absolutely don't stand a chance unless you've come from a top 10 school or ivy leage school
Everyone I've talked to in the industry views people with a Masters much less favorably than people with a Bachelors or PhD.
And from experience I can say there is a shockingly high number of people with Masters in Comp Sci churning through the hiring pool who can't write a single line of code or even valid HTML.
I don't know why this is, but I think a Masters is getting a negative reputation to the point that you might consider not listing it on your resume at all in certain cases.
Getting an MS is a sign that the candidate wasn't particularly good before getting one, because of the various reasons people get an MS. And it's not like they became a better developer as a result of getting one.
Only true for recent grads (2-3 years after college). Google itself (and ex-googlers) say degree doesn't matter for job applicants with some work experience.
Everything becomes easier with a degree, doubly so with a degree from a top university. But they only use that as a factor in deciding who to interview; all they care about when deciding who to hire is interview performance. Someone without a degree should be optimizing their search by convincing hiring managers or employees to refer them into the process directly, thereby short circuiting the recruiters.