Seriously? With a sample size of 1, you are blaming hacker news for bad advice rather than blaming the hiring manager for having a rare/bizarre attitude?
Same here: I was hired as one of the youngest full-time employees at a Fortune 100 company. I did not have a degree, and on top of that, attended a community college, but I was Student Body President there. I also co-founded a Student Newspaper and Chess Club (both of which still exist years later.)
My previous experience was selling shareware for a few years, which helped me demonstrate that I knew what I was doing, as well as making me comfortable communicating with adults in their 40's when I applied for a position (when my dad was laid off). I had only applied to a few companies and did not have problems getting interviews. I also sent recruiters and managers, follow up e-mails with code, screen shots, and links to websites and software I had created, after each interview.
The other few young employees there had started as temps or in the training pool. Although they had Bachelor's Degrees on top of that, they didn't have a real job title for months after I did. What matters is that the managers who hired me could see I had drive and did not rely on having a piece of paper.
In my first two months, I got an iPhone and told my manager I thought the company should have an iPhone web application and then a native application when the devkit came out. I also got them to sign up for the iPhone Enterprise Beta. I taught the guy who hired me all about differences between phones and technologies, how hard it was to program for each one, and different applications that could be made. Multiple times he felt the idea had run dry, and I told him that if we could just get statistics about this, we would be good to go. So he partnered with his friend who did have such statistics and I was out of the picture suddenly... But some of my mockups did make it to the presentation shown in front of who-are-now the CIO and CTO of the company, as well as the two Chief Operating Officers. Sure, it would have been nice (and fair) for me to attend those meetings and get credit and a bonus, but it was a good learning experience about the corporate world. Looking back, I probably should have made my own presentations early on (using publicly available information) and made sure everybody knew the whole story, because apparently the manager who had told me he wanted to work on this with me, only cared about his own name getting mentioned--so don't worry, maybe you're not missing much from big corporate after all. :)
I am completing a B.S. in Computer Science and Mathematics right now, a decision I made as school started in September because I felt I should get my degree then move to California. I hope I will have the same swagger and hustle as I did without a degree, instead of relying on it in any way. I am focusing on theory as much as possible (Algorithms, AI, math courses), even though it will hurt my GPA, because I can learn other stuff myself.
Instead of being bitter, think of how lucky you are. For me, losing the freedom of working on my own software product in order to work at a Fortune 100 company, and now attending a research university for a four year degree that causes frequent sleepless nights, feels like I'm on a "downward spiral". In reality, that's better than 99% of what other individuals can accomplish at our age (assuming you're in the mid-20's or younger), and that's just in the United States alone. Your situation is very similar, and we should feel lucky.
You get out of a degree as much as you put in. This should reinforce your "swagger and hustle" rather than weaken it.
From an employment perspective, you are simply making HR people happy. The technical interviewers don't see much value in a degree in practice, even if they will tell you differently.
Sometimes school teaches you the things you wouldn't take the time to learn normally but are so vital to your experience as a hacker. I value school in that respect, sometimes you need a push to learn something to open up your mind a bit.
Kudos to this guy, I agree with his path. He's not just making HR people happy, he's truly learning regardless of what his GPA may become after it.
I do agree, you do only get as much out of the degree as you put in.
I think your argument is valid, sometimes you get more out of learning something when you're forced to learn the alternatives and edge cases that don't matter in a learn-as-you-go approach.
However, take two job candidates:
One of them just has a CS degree, let's even say it was from a "prestigious" university or whatever. No internships, no computer-related jobs, no open source / hobby projects, nothing else except good grades and dubious academic rewards.
The other has no college degree, but has spent 4 years working various junior positions / contract jobs that pertain directly to the job in question, mentioning several cases where they wrote/maintained software in a production environment. To even the field, let's just say they don't have any open source / hobby projects or otherwise "outside" experience.
They are both asking for the same salary and are "equal" in terms of team fit and other non-technical factors. Who would you hire? This is ultimately the point I'm trying to make.
