[marcus_holmes]

I don't want developers who continue doing something even when it's blatantly the wrong thing to be doing.

Flunking out of university is not the "short path". It's the hard path. Getting a degree is not difficult, or even hard work. It's the easy choice - the thing everyone expects you to do.

I don't want people who follow orders and do what they're told. I want people who are prepared to make hard decisions, take the less-travelled path, do what they feel is right and not just what everyone else tells them is right.

I want someone who can actually code, and not someone who has a certificate that says they can code.

My 2 cents.

[sarusso]

I think we are just talking about two different things, and that you have in mind "coders" and "developers", not software engineers or data scientists. But the OP was talking about the latter, not the first, where I can to some extent agree with you.

I saw it many times: javascript kids or self-taught backend Python "engineers" falling extremely short when it came to scalability, algorithmic complexity, or just abstracting concepts.

Similarly, I saw several self-claimed "data scientists" not even knowing what a non gaussian error distribution means.

Not knowing this stuff jeopardise your work and the projects you are working in.

Then, if you are telling me that your interview process should spot these shortcomings at the same level a university degree can, then to me this sounds a bit unrealistic.

However, if you need someone that can write code to pass the unit-tests that some one else wrote without taking any architectural decision, than OK I can agree with you, but it does not sound much of an appealing career path IMO.