[mindcrime]

Given that my own background[1] is a weird mishmash of formal education at various levels, and auto-didactic learning, I would be totally down with hiring somebody without requiring that they have a particular degree. As long as they can convince me that they have the required knowledge / skills, I really don't care if they're self-taught, university educated, learned through an apprenticeship, learned at a community college, or some hybrid of all of the above. I'm only interested in the end result.

[1]: For what it's worth, I was a junior when I dropped out of my bachelor's degree in CS program, but over the years I've accumulated 3 associate degrees: General Education, Computer Programming, and High Performance Computing, and have studied all sorts of stuff on my own time... just because it's what I found interesting. And I still work on learning new stuff each and every day. <shrug />