Have there been any times you applied and didn't get a job?

I ask because it is very unlikely an employer will straight up tell you that this was the reason.

Amazon engineering staff told me they wanted to hire me but could not because of some college degree policy they used to have. I dodged a bullet really, now I know better than to work for a company like Amazon.

While there certainly are a lot of companies that don't care about your degree, there are at least as many companies that won't even look at your resume without one. It literally gets auto-filtered. (Especially with less than 5 years of experience.) And as much as I'd like to say that you don't want to work for those kinds of people anyway, in my experience it is at best loosely connected to how your day to day work life actually looks like.

> there are at least as many companies that won't even look at your resume without one

And it’s about to get worse. You could get a job without a degree or any relevant experience in the 90’s because there were so many to be had and so few degrees to be found. Once you were in, you could stay in by virtue of your experience. This isn’t the case any more; it’s about to be impossible to get an entry level development job without a relevant degree. I think sometimes HN commenters forget that there’s a whole generation of kids in high school today who didn’t work for .com startups throughout the 90’s…

Oddly, I find the most prestigious companies are the ones who care the least. Probably because they have the skills to assess candidates properly, whereas LOCAL STATE BANK manager doesn't know why she needs someone with Spring Boot experience, and has to rely on the much noisier degrees and years of exp.

I think the biggest problem our industry has is tying internships to 'enroled in college or university'. Eliminate that requirement, and now people have a path in. Software development is a somewhere between a trade and an amateur mathematics program.

>Oddly, I find the most prestigious companies are the ones who care the least.

Hmm, I wonder about that actually. From what I've heard (hearsay, really), for a normal application Google and Microsoft won't look at it without a degree. But maybe they don't really look at it anyway. The only big company that I've heard doesn't really care is Nvidia, so props to them I suppose, but again, I heard that from one guy who's working there who might not have been entirely honest about prior contact with them, so I really can't say for sure. It would definitely be interesting though.

After a certain amount of experienced it isn't asked about anymore. Perhaps because a lot of what you would have learned would be outdated anyway or you would have picked it up on the job. When starting out tho at some you can get by by shown competencies, software you made or contributed to, tests, etc but it can matter at a lot of places