How so? You can certainly unintentionally filter out smart people who didn't go to college (or went to a less prestigious college) by this method.
However I imagine people who fit the description of "dumb guy who fluked his way through MIT math programme with a high GPA" are a pretty endangered species.
I imagine people who fit the description of "dumb guy who fluked his way through MIT math programme with a high GPA" are a pretty endangered species.
Maybe.
But people who fit the description of "smart guy who got through MIT math programme with a high GPA but is clueless about the fundamentals of software engineering and aggressively unwilling to learn"? Probably not so endangered.
Besides remember you're competing with other employers, and on average employers currently overvalue paper qualifications. Once you take that into account it's probably rational to place negative weight on them: other things equal, the guy who didn't go to college has a better chance of being good than the MIT graduate, because MIT graduates who were good, have probably already been snapped up.
For the purposes of a given job, let alone the types of jobs discussed in these threads, it's going to dump a bunch of false negatives. Since software is an industry that thrives on overqualified employees, this may not seem like a big deal, but having people who can interview a Big Degree person such that they'll accept these jobs has its own cost and management overhead.
You might certainly have to scale back demands/expectations depending on the job market and how desirable your company is to work for.
I think it goes back to the classic "smart and gets things done". There will often be instances where you will have more evidence for one than the other.
So for example, someone with a good degree probably doesn't need to be asked riddle questions because they have already proved their raw mental aptitude so you're probably more interested in their understand of good programming practises etc.
OTOH, the guy without a degree who has a solid string of practical experience behind him as well as glowing references has proven he can "get things done". However perhaps his past jobs were mainly building CRUD php applications and this position requires some more complex theoretical knowledge that he does not posses.
How can you best test his aptitude for picking up that knowledge quickly if not with something that approximates an IQ test?
Another proxy that is often used here is "Do you have a good degree in a difficult subject from a prestigious university?".