Are you not conflating two related but separate hiring issues here? 1) Are there diamonds to be found in the hiring pool of candidates without a CS degree? 2)

Are you not conflating two related but separate hiring issues here? 1) Are there diamonds to be found in the hiring pool of candidates without a CS degree? 2) Whats the most efficient way to hire people in an era where a hiring managers or company HR can receive thousands of resumes for a position? You're refuting my point on the basis of (2) for which I made no claim. To that point, yes obviously any process chosen has to be practical and take into account many requirements. However (2) is an issue whether or not you screen based on CS degree. Moreover, it doesn't necessarily get worse. Any major change to evaluation process should be holistic and take into account number of evaluations, time and money invested to evaluate, and where resources are spent in the process. You could come out the same or better in time and complexity, hence "process optimization". Lots of approaches have been tried and some are anecdotally successful. The biggest obstacle I've seen to improving process is scaling it up to large numbers. What's optimal for organizations of every size and requirement set can't be written in stone. I would just hope that whatever the policy at my organization would have been, still someone would have whispered Faraday's name to me, along with countless other folks who wont be famous but who we've all seen make great contributions.