I used to do web-apps for a hosting company to earn money to help pay for school. (I think earning a degree was worth every cent BTW) None of the coders there had a degree and they were all very good at making everything work. This was a team of 2-3 people on a codebase of 50,000 lines of PHP / MySQL - The owners of the company also didn't have a degree and they seemed to prefer hiring people without one.
The other posters who have spoke of a degree as a filter which lowers the cost of interviewing are correct. I can think of two occasions over the 1.5 yrs that I worked there where they hired people who didn't have a clue what they were doing. This was obvious immediately and they had to be ruthless about firing them. I don't know if requiring a degree would have made this nastiness less likely, but these mistakes have a significant cost for both the employer and the employee.
The other posters who have spoke of a degree as a filter which lowers the cost of interviewing are correct. I can think of two occasions over the 1.5 yrs that I worked there where they hired people who didn't have a clue what they were doing. This was obvious immediately and they had to be ruthless about firing them. I don't know if requiring a degree would have made this nastiness less likely, but these mistakes have a significant cost for both the employer and the employee.