I've worked with some terrible programmers that have Stanford CS degrees, and one of the best programmers (CTE..) I've ever worked with also has a degree from S

I've worked with some terrible programmers that have Stanford CS degrees, and one of the best programmers (CTE..) I've ever worked with also has a degree from Stanford CS. It's just not a very good metric to determine skill. A university education demonstrates a commitment to studying for a reasonable period of time, which in itself is something valuable, however, anyone that has had more than a decade of industry relevant experience is self taught. After that time, what you learned in school pales into insignificance compared with what you (hopefully) have learned on the job (and in side projects). The computing landscape changes every decade or so. The last one has seen dynamic languages come to the forefront and be actually used outside of school projects. And of course web development is completely new. It bought with it an entirely new sense of scale (think of Facebook's image serving needs, or Google's pagerank number matrix math) I'm glad for Zeke and I'm glad for MSFT that they have hiring criteria that make sense. People have wrongly in my opinion written them off in favor of the new hotness (GOOG), but I am a little reluctant to be so hasty. While its true that I haven't used (or needed) a MSFT product for a while, I am also not naive enough to realize that a software developer in San Francisco isn't really typical of a computer user, when averaged over the globe.