Although there are some standout exceptions the hacker community is obsessed with credentials.
Most of the job listings I see, on a daily basis call for a computer science degree, and its almost never qualified with (or equivalent experience).
This is a recent phenomenon and I have a feeling it has to do with the glut of comp-sci graduates that got stuffed in the pipeline since the first dot com bubble. Now they are mostly just hiring their own kind to perpetuate an artificial scarcity and keep their value up.
I miss the days when I could work, and learn, alongside a motley crew of developers from all kinds of backgrounds, and the cream, not the credentialed, would rise to the top.
Most of the job postings use stuff like "MS in CS" as a filter.
Since I don't have a degree, I've learned that you need to bypass this nonsense with personal contact. The only time I ever had a problem was in an interview with a guy who had /two/ PhDs, who handed me his biz card (with two degrees on it) and who said that he had two degrees several times while introducing himself, and who the company jettisoned a few months later (because he was obnoxious and impossible to work with).
That is corporate jobs, not the hacker community. I don't have so much as a single college credit to my name and the harvard educated CTO of my company didn't even mention it when I got hired. Stop reading monster.com job posts thinking it has anything to do with "hackers".
Maybe SF is different, but I'm talking the Boston/Cambridge area, those are not "corporate" companies. Just an amazing coincidence those companies are mostly in college towns? I really wish you were right, but I'm not seeing it.
Boston/Cambridge is startup land on the east coast. I'd say about 90% of the job listings I see for startups or web companies are in boston or cambridge. Bigger "more corporate" companies are situated around route 128.
Most of the job listings I see, on a daily basis call for a computer science degree, and its almost never qualified with (or equivalent experience).
This is a recent phenomenon and I have a feeling it has to do with the glut of comp-sci graduates that got stuffed in the pipeline since the first dot com bubble. Now they are mostly just hiring their own kind to perpetuate an artificial scarcity and keep their value up.
I miss the days when I could work, and learn, alongside a motley crew of developers from all kinds of backgrounds, and the cream, not the credentialed, would rise to the top.