Not having a formal education doesn't mean not having the knowledge or not the ability to, though? People obviously need to be "of ability". But I've talked to plenty of people with degrees who are dumb as a rock, and others without who are sharp and have many relevant achievements. Of course the same applies in reverse: there are plenty without a degree that aren't worth talking to.
Say you found someone who ticked all the boxes, was absolutely great across the board, yet just said: "I didn't bother finishing the degree, because I didn't feel it would teach me any new skills". Would you pass on that person, and if so, why?
I personally don't see any reasons why I would, but I'm curious to know why others would.
Most places an application without a degree wouldn't make it far enough through the hiring system for anyone to actually read it.
I have interviewed a few youngsters who were self taught though, but they lacked a lot of the basic theoretical knowledge about things like best practices. So while they may have been superstars at producing interesting prototypes I frankly couldn't use them in an enterprise environment.
On the other hand I've interviewed a lot of people with degrees who couldn't get their code up and running in a production environment because they had never actually done that. This is a lot easier to rectify than someone who doesn't understand how our peojects are run.
I'm sure this is different from place to place, but in Denmark where education is free, and the government pays you to go to school, it's really rare that talented people haven't gotten some sort of degree.
It's a capacity issue - you wouldn't 'find somebody who ticked all the boxes, but didn't have a degree' in the first place, because their resume would simply not make it into the interview pile. Now that may be shortsighted or suboptimal on the part of the hiring company, but it's a quick and dirty heuristic to reduce the pile of resumes to something more manageable.
Say you found someone who ticked all the boxes, was absolutely great across the board, yet just said: "I didn't bother finishing the degree, because I didn't feel it would teach me any new skills". Would you pass on that person, and if so, why?
I personally don't see any reasons why I would, but I'm curious to know why others would.