[coliveira]

You shouldn't necessarily care about this at a personal level, but this has some deep implications, which might be a reason for concern for your parents and/or the society:

1. The company doesn't value education. It only cares if somebody can do the hard work and maybe pick up what he/she needs to perform at the same level of other people who have degrees.

2. The university program you attended did not give you any skills that can provide a differential in the market. It is clear that several degrees give that differential, such as psychology, electrical engineering, medicine, just to mention a few.

I think both issues are true for CS degrees. Companies are too interested in getting bodies to do their programming jobs, and don't care if the people have the right kind of education (especially at big companies like Google). Universities, on the other hand, are doing a lousy job of preparing people for the profession.

[lawnchair_larry]

It doesn't have those implications at all. I'm not sure if you live under a rock, but Google values education very highly. The error in your logic is believing that a lack of a degree is a lack of an education. A degree is the obvious way to get an education, but not the only way.

In many professions this isn't feasible, but development? Everything is online. That doesn't mean universities don't provide value. If you were expecting that they would provide exclusive value, as if they have some kind of monopoly on knowledge, and no one could possibly learn the same material in a self-directed way, your expectations need some adjusting.

[randomdata]

As far as development jobs are concerned, the work is out in the open enough that, while education (formal or otherwise) remains important, the accreditation part has little value.

It is difficult to evaluate, say, a doctor - possibly not the best example, but the first that came to mind - based on his past surgeries because much of that data is never recorded, and what is recorded is impossible to access for a variety of reasons. Therefore you need some kind of system to say that, yes, this doctor is capable of doing the job.

Programmers do not really have that problem. Everything you do is recorded, and in many cases that data is accessible for any prospective employers. Worst-case, if you really have nothing else to show, is that you have to spend a few weeks writing some software to publish to GitHub. With that data, you can prove some level of competency, which is already everything a degree can do and more.

So it is not that education is not valued. It certainly is: You would never be able to do the job without some kind of education. It is that your work speaks for itself, so the degree does not need to be valued.

[coliveira]

Every profession has some level at which you don't need a university degree to work. For example, the medical profession has paramedicals. Civil engineering have civil engineering technicians. This is the kind of difference that has not been made in the software engineering profession, and would make life easier for everyone. If you just want to be a programmer, get a job at that level without the need of a university degree. The CS/Comp.Eng. degree, on the other hand, should prepare people not just to program but to design and manage complex software projects.