I think some parts of the job market ignore degrees. I know many people who got very solid SWE jobs through the popular recruitment platforms. Those platforms

I think some parts of the job market ignore degrees. I know many people who got very solid SWE jobs through the popular recruitment platforms. Those platforms essentially allow people to get an on-site with big tech and startups without ever sharing one's resume: they rely solely on the results of technical interviews to screen for promising candidates. The employer spends ~$5000 to bring the candidate on-site (fees to the recruitment platform, plus the flight/hotels, plus the full day of engineers' time spent on the interviews). So I highly doubt the employer auto-rejects candidates without a degree regardless of their on-site performance. If they wanted to do that, they would have simply asked the recruitment platform to screen people for degree in advance, to avoid wasting $5k on a hopeless candidate. Of course, I'm describing only a specific slice (Silicon Valley, maybe NYC) of the specific industry (software engineering). I guess such disregard of degrees hasn't spread to other parts of the job market because most companies, in most industries, believe that the degree provides useful information above and beyond what can be learned in an interview. Are they wrong in that belief? Or do degrees, despite being such a horrible proxy for skill, still provide a valuable incremental statistical signal about the candidate's likely fit?