[93po]

Interviewing isn't just a measure of how good you are at programming in real life. It's how good of an employee you will be. Conformity is a strong indicator of this. Comparing someone who completed a CS degree versus some guy that learned to program in a garage hacking together broken computer parts - the employer is going to choose the CS degree guy, even if the hacker is better at programming. CS degree means you follow direction, you can work within a rigid structure, you follow rules enough to make good grades and not get kicked out, and you're capable of doing monotonous work that sometimes has very little value.

[fivre]

eh, not really. even if you have a CS degree you forget how to do typical algo hard problems quickly after working in industry because you so rarely need to do them. the CS degree lets me _recognize_ when there's a problem with a particular complexity domain that needs a time- or space-efficient solution to scale, but I sure as hell can't recall the exact strategy on the spot like interview scenarios demand.

given a day or two, sure, I can go review, find that solution, and provide an implementation and explanation as to why it matters for a particular problem domain, but an hour-long phone interview isn't gonna check that effectively, unless they really want to see the initial stage of me silently reviewing maths literature to awaken knowledge in cold storage

on contrast, I _can_ explore systems design stuff fine in that space of time, because systems design _is_ what I practice regularly in industry, because that's what I'm regularly asked to do.

[blululu]

You're trying to frame this about college degree vs none. I'm sure that's a valid point and a college degree has value, but that's not relevant if we are talking about a degree in CS vs a degree in EE/Math/Physics. CS degree does not mean that you follow direction or work within a rigid structure any more than a degree in any other mathematical science. The Leet Code question biases the evaluation very strongly to tidbits of CS trivia that may or may not be relevant to the actual job. This will filter out someone with a background in say electrical engineering, even if the job is about doing linear algebra and signal processing (areas where EE is probably a better training than CS).

[93po]

That's a fair point