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.
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.