Was your friend in engineering? And what kind of level was your friend shooting for? Because yeah, if you are shooting for a director or a partner level positio

Was your friend in engineering? And what kind of level was your friend shooting for? Because yeah, if you are shooting for a director or a partner level position, you better have a degree. But for a regular senior engineer position? Not at all. Also, i don't know when your friend tried to get re-hired and at which level. The whole "we don't care as much about degrees anymore" is a fairly recent thing, I would say 5 or so years. And of course, if your friend only worked at MSFT for a few years, then left to do school, and then tried to come back, they would be probably still shooting for a close-to-entry level position, not a senior. And entry-level without a degree or something else to compensate for it is going to be really tough. Normally it is compensated by either years of experience or something else (side projects, major open-source contribs, etc.), hence why I never saw someone without a degree at entry-level, but plenty who are senior engineers.