A lot of people with degrees get sorted out if the screen prossee along with people who have no degrees. Because you’re absolutely right, university CS doesn’t necessarily make great programmers.

If I’m hiring for a programming job I typically prefer people with academy or engineering degrees though. They are taught less theory and more application.

A degree isn’t all we look at though, we’ll also look at your public code repository, but we won’t take a look unless you have a degree because we need you to do both theory and application, and we need you to have learned best practices in both.

I’m not saying people without degrees are useless mind you, I just don’t want to spend time finding the ones who aren’t, when I don’t have to.