[kodah]

It absolutely is but it depends on the field. My first few years in software were filled with questions like, "Why didn't you finish?" We also continue to interview in ways that are more accommodating for college graduates and attendees, regardless of whether it's needed or not.

[lapsedacademic]

I see. Makes sense. I was thinking more about "general social status", rather than job-specific stuff, because that's how I interpreted OP.

> We also continue to interview in ways that are more accommodating for college graduates and attendees, regardless of whether it's needed or not.

Wouldn't Leetcode-style interviewing be more egalitarian? Assuming self-taught people know their stuff, I guess? The alternative in other engineering disciplines is to just check the degree and do some soft interviews, right?

Or do you mean something else?

[kodah]

The DS/A stuff that's taught in schools as well as math aids a lot in leetcode style interviews. Consider that material to be a very large hill to climb to understand solving these problems in a time-boxed manner. Additionally, most of the time these problems have nothing to do with your day to day work - which begs the question: why do they exist in the first place?

[lapsedacademic]

I'm in an awkward situation because I'm in R&D, so every job I've had uses DS/A style stuff intensely every day. The engineers I hire are mostly there to help me with my work, so they need the DS/A style stuff. I don't really care about someone having a college degree, but they do need a level of maturity equivalent to an upper-division algorithms course to be productive/useful.

It is odd that jobs which don't require this knowledge test for it.

[kodah]

Your job sounds super niche. I work in R&D and we definitely don't use DS/A most of the time. That said, most of these FAANG and start up jobs are just like mine. They test for those skills anyway.