"Does Google still refuse to hire people unless they have computer science degrees?"
No.
"In this day and age that doesn't make sense."
It didn't make sense when they semi-officially had that policy either, particularly if you consider how relatively young of a company Google is (granted, "young" is subjective, I'm 40 years old). But when you're incubated in academia and turn out to be very successful, it is easy to think that your best bet is to keep one and a half feet firmly planted in that world.
Of course, Google isn't/wasn't alone, lots of companies have lots of policies that don't really make any sense outside of whatever echo chamber they've created for themselves.
It's never been an absolute policy, but they certainly used to prefer people with degrees; it's an easy filter when you've got a million CVs a year to parse through.
HR found it was useless as a predictor of success, though, and the policy was officially dropped last year:
No.
"In this day and age that doesn't make sense."
It didn't make sense when they semi-officially had that policy either, particularly if you consider how relatively young of a company Google is (granted, "young" is subjective, I'm 40 years old). But when you're incubated in academia and turn out to be very successful, it is easy to think that your best bet is to keep one and a half feet firmly planted in that world.
Of course, Google isn't/wasn't alone, lots of companies have lots of policies that don't really make any sense outside of whatever echo chamber they've created for themselves.