Well, Laszlo Bock claims Google looked at the data and found zero correlation between having a degree from a well respected university and being useful at Google

http://mobile.nytimes.com/2014/02/23/opinion/sunday/friedman...

So no, using a degree isn't useful for hiring engineers apparently

The common response to various claims that Google make based on their HR data is: "But they only looked at the people who succesfully got hired at Google".

Which seems a fair criticism to me. Google's hiring process may be as wacky and broken as any other corp, but they're a big name, and will attract a lot of very good applicants.

So "People who got succesfully got hired at Google, and don't have a prestigious degree, do about as well as people who got hired at Google and did have a prestigious degree."

If you're on the outside looking to get a job, you'd probably want to know what percentage of Google employees had prestigous degrees, and what other resume filling achievements the non-prestigious degree crowd had before basing any life decisions on this data point.

That's pretty weird though.

Is using a degree useful for hiring medical doctors, mechanical engineers, actuaries? It's really hard to believe that only Computer Science as a field has a problem where it's churning out people who are technically incapable of programming to such a degree that you need to explicitly test them in interviews through "puzzles".

Maybe they all have that problem and no one has ever bother to actually check the data?

I know for me and interviewing programmers my personal experience is the degree doesn't matter. I've met plenty of degreed "engineers" who couldn't program for shit from schools like MIT and Harvard. I've also met some amazing programmers from those same places. I don't know what make the difference except possible love of the activity. Not sure how to asses that in an interview or whether it correlates better with outcomes.

For medical doctors, having a degree just means you get to spend years in a residency training program under supervision. SEs also have internships, but they usually want someone they don't need to train from 'scratch'.

I have met some people with degrees, from extremely respected institutions, who I would not let organise the coffee in a startup let alone be involved in serious business tasks.

Likewise, some of the best engineers I have met were self-taught and curious.