Yes. If you don't have a degree there's a good chance you won't get past the initial screening at some companies. In practice, if you get dozens of applicants

Yes. If you don't have a degree there's a good chance you won't get past the initial screening at some companies. In practice, if you get dozens of applicants for the same position you may be looking for excuses not to bring people in. And there are some companies that have a famously academia-focused culture, like Google. While most startups say that they don't care about degrees, the reality is that somebody with little experience who happens to have a CS degree from Stanford has a lot of doors open to them, especially in a place like Silicon Valley where so many founders -- and VCs -- are Stanford grads. This has happened to me more than once. Recruiter emails aren't a good measure for this; a dismaying number of recruiters only contact you based on keyword matches against your profile, and don't actually look at your resume. (Hence why I regularly get emails looking for contract Java developers in the northeast US, despite the fact that I'm a technical writer with a full time, non-contract job in Mountain View.) I suspect there's going to be more of a focus on degrees going forward, not less, simply because it seems like more and more people are going to "developer boot camps" and trying to get out on the market without a CS background. I don't have a CS background, so I don't want to say that's necessarily a bad thing, but I suspect in a year or two we'll be creating more tech job seekers than tech jobs, and as the market tightens, screening will get more stringent. People with stellar track records are still going to get work, degrees or not, but people who are "merely good" may find that a degree tips things in their favor.