I filter based on experience. Previous jobs, roles, projects. Degree is a weak predictor and I consider it mostly for candidates with less than 3 years of experience.
I guess my question transitions over to: If a candidate has less than 3 years experience and no degree, where does that fall on your radar? Genuinely curious as it falls into the "need experience to get experience" job meme many people find initially.
Speaking from my perspective as a prolific FAANG interviewer: Listing whatever experience you can (high-school jobs, sites created for friends, college jobs) alongside interesting personal projects is a huge leg up for getting through recruiting. If you're early in your career, find a few small-time jobs somewhere in tech that'll hire you, and learn as much as you can as fast as you can. MSPs are desperate for people with a little coding background. They'll chew you up and spit you out with long hours and terrible pay, but they're a great place to cut your teeth on getting things done.
Once a candidate gets to me as an interviewer, I'm mostly looking at a resume for what topics I should ask about, both things that you're comfortable in, and things that you're not. If you have personal projects, I'll ask pertinent questions about them, and often I've learned some very interesting insights from the personal projects of candidates.
In my time interviewing, I've hired people without degrees as senior engineers and I've rejected people with doctorates in computer science as junior support engineers. Turns out, degrees are a mediocre predictor at best of ability to do a job, and practical experience is 99% of the time more impactful than a piece of paper.
> Speaking from my perspective as a prolific FAANG interviewer
That's interesting, and somewhat rankling - as both times I interviewed at the G in FAANG, not a single interviewer gave a nickel about any of my experience, or projects I had worked on.
It's such a joke that the keys to a golden line on your resume and a giant salary are gated by the luck of which 7 people get picked to grill you that day, how busy they currently are, and what their pet question is.
If a candidate has less than 3 years of experience AND he has nothing to show AND he has no degree... he will not pass the filter.
Moreover, I'm not really interested in "years of experience". Previous titles don't really matter, too.
What does matter for junior and middle developers: personal projects, specific products or features developed by them or their team, accounts on Upwork, GitHub or StackOverflow, recommendations from other people, a personal website or a blog.
We are talking about the initial screening filter, so _anything_ proving you are a real developer is fine.
