Curious how it comes up? I’m 42 and dropped out at 16, and it has just never come up, nobody has ever asked me once. I’m not doubting your experience, just curious where our paths differed since it’s such a stark contrast. I’m not a programmer but worked in ops, then product management, then CPO. Maybe it’s something to do with that?
I'm a Senior II and tech lead at work and I've always been on the programming track.
Around ~22 months ago, I had a cold call from someone in HR asking me, "Did you finish your degree?" It was unusual. I'm not sure where they got the idea that I was "working on it" in the first place. This was happening around the same time that we had been acquired, so I imagine that it was related.
More recently, around the end of last summer, a mid-level on my team had apparently heard from someone else that I didn't have a degree and was probing me about my experience, etc.
It also came up in conversation during the Christmas holiday, with some friends, while playing an online game. This group of friends is also in tech, though they're a little younger than I am. In that conversation, they were surprised to learn that I didn't have a degree but held patents in the CV space (work done on a bootstrapped start-up that myself and a friend/co-founder worked on in the early/mid 2010s).
There are other examples from the past but I don't really hang onto these sorts of things.
I would add that I don't think any of these were bias or malicious or anything like that.
Possibly enterprise development. In my experience they are a lot more credentials driven then startups and boutique development firms. There are outliers like Microsoft, Netflix, Google. But you have a to be a truly outstanding developer without a degree rather than a pretty good one with a degree.
