I don't think a degree is necessary; certainly not necessary in the same sense that you would want your brain surgeon to have graduated from medical school. I

I don't think a degree is necessary; certainly not necessary in the same sense that you would want your brain surgeon to have graduated from medical school. I think there are two separate problems here, though - one in which a particular individual is being assessed for his or her aptitude, and one where dozens or hundreds of applicants for a particular position must be evaluated on the basis of limited information, often from a pool of even more candidates. A degree by itself is not a terribly reliable proxy for capability or potential, but better proxies are harder to scale and apply to many more people. Companies like degrees because they're an easy, lazy way to (at least in the minds of HR people) establish a competency baseline, and if it's true that most companies would rather have false negatives than false positives, it's easy to see why a degree would be "required" in a lot of cases. Hopefully that will change in the future.