Note: Google approached me after seeing my stackoverflow account and other things on the Internet. After a very nice email chat, I sent my CV and got rejected due to no CS degree ...
Translation: Someone technical decided that they like your chops. Someone not-technical bounced you due to a checklist. If you held a degree in "Advanced Underwater Basketweaving", that would have been sufficient to tick off the "Has a degree" box.
And I made my choice. It's interesting to see how those doing the sifting care a lot about something that did or did not happen many, many, years ago, but in terms of actual job experience, only care about what you're doing in your most recent position. (This doubly applies to all of the "We don't hire the unemployed." companies)
I do feel HR departments have too much control in hiring process's. Sadly education descrimination is one such area still fully allowed by law, despite the lesser paper educated person being more able to do the job.
Bottom line if they are letting alot of talent slip thru the nets due to this rigid policey then eventualy they will create competition.
One does wonder when you read all these stories of big companies formed by people who quite doing there degree's half way thru and then read about a big company insisting that all employee's have a degree. Just have to laugh and move on.
I was once at a interview were the HR people were assholes like that though the IT manager in a seprate interview was blown away with my skill's and demostrated abilities and offered me more than what I was asking for, I turned them down due to the experience I had in the HR interview prior to the technical interview and told them why as well. Took a lesser paid job at a company called RAND who I had also interviewed with that same day. Had HR not been so rude and downright insulting due to my age etc, then I would of taken there job offer. Retrospectivly though I did make the best choice in the end, which was comforting.
HR definitely have too much say in IT hiring in many places - I suspect many CVs go in the bin for not matching the exact acronym or buzzword on HR's list, when any technical person would see extensive experience of the same or highly related technologies just listed under different names.
I am a little biased as another dropout but many technical job adverts here in the UK not only specify a degree but that it must be at least a 2:1 from (whatever HR/the manager thinks is) a "respected university"!
5 years ago I applied for a technical support job at an extremely low salary (I was relocating and applying for anything I saw) and got a phone call saying they'd got my CV but needed to know if I had a degree. I'm sure finishing my degree in formal derivations of algorithms would have been highly useful for a job crawling under desks looking to see if any cables had fallen out. Luckily in the month it took them to phone me and ask I'd found a much better job.
I think it is right to filter based on education in many circumstances (such as being a doctor to do surgery, relevent qualifications to build bridges etc) ... but I also think that CS and programming are different to some small degree.