I don't think that a degree was ever necessary, there's always been self taught people. It's just the amount of accessible info on the Internet makes it much ea

I don't think that a degree was ever necessary, there's always been self taught people. It's just the amount of accessible info on the Internet makes it much easier to self teach nowadays. I don't know about Facebook/Google specifically but some companies will only interview/hire people with experience/know how in the very specific technology stack they use. I guess because they don't want the employee to "waste" time learning a new language/framework. You miss out on some great engineers that way. Thankfully my job doesn't require new hires to know the syntax of any particular programming language.