It's pretty silly to require a degree. Like, you only get so many job applicants, and you have to filter them down somehow into job offers, and everything that isn't "how good is their code" ends up hurting how good of a programmer you wind up with.

Granted, sometimes you want to make the tradeoff - there are some truly toxic people with zero professionalism and beautiful code, after all. It's just obvious to me that I'd rather have better code than someone with a piece of paper from a university.