My mentor long ago likened these people to Eloi and the IT grunts to Morlocks. I cannot say I disagree.
Everyone is the hero of their own story. It sounds like your mentor is arrogant, and could use more intellectual humility.
>By the year AD 802,701, humanity has evolved into two separate species: the Eloi and the Morlocks. The Eloi live a banal life of ease on the surface of the earth while the Morlocks live underground, tending machinery and providing food, clothing, and inventory for the Eloi.
Please explain how is this arrogant?
Is the condescension and self-importance more clear now? It's an Us versus Them mentality which patronizes other people and looks down on their work.
In my experience, high performance in difficult degrees at good schools are a very strong indicator of future success.
We find gems outside the above profile, but it holds true even across the people we've hired from code schools.
I don't work for a FAANG.
50 years ago big companies would take you with just a HS degree, and if you were smart and showed initiative, put you under the wing of an engineer - or pay to send you to school. This does not happen anymore.
You're also SEVERELY limiting your career if all you complete is high school - you might be OK technically for now, but you will lack all kinds of foundations that would allow you to stay technical, and you'll certainly be disregarded completely as you age for any kind of leadership track.
I think the root of this myth (that having only a HS degree you can still get a technical job) is twofold: One, a currently hot hiring market, and two, the "be what you dream!" movement that was big in the 90's.
If you've worked through a recession (or even just a dulled market), and seen people around you lose their work, their homes, heard their struggles about how hard it is to find work - people would stop parroting this mantra about having minimal education. It's really doing damage to people who hear it.
I've been getting paid to build web apps since 2000, got in right when the first dot-com bust went down; I have never been out of work since entering this field.
I also tend to work for smaller companies.
If you have a stack of resumes you're likely to interview everyone with a PhD, but only the ones with the most stellar github profile if they have no formal education.
During the interview if the PhD says something silly you'll probably disregard it. But the person without a formal education needs to be on point.
These and other filters means that a mediocre PhD can get through the hiring gauntlet but only the most kick ass high school graduates can make it through.