Company Stops Hiring Self-Taught Juniors

My company just decided to stop hiring self taught candidates for junior positions. I'm pretty surprised to be honest and did not expect it, especially considering I joined as a junior several years ago completely self taught (then later went on to get my degree as the company paid for it). We're a big tech company, fully remote, starting pay for juniors is around ~150k USD. According to upper management, it's because the volume of self-taught applicants is too high (a few thousand per posting) and the quality of self-taught applicants is too low. Apparently a lot of teams have hired self taught developers and it's gone very bad. So as a result, the company announced Friday that it would no longer be hiring self-taught applicants and instead will require candidates to have a degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering or Software Engineering. Anyone else experienced this?

A self-taught software developer says their large remote tech company has stopped hiring self-taught candidates for junior roles, despite the author having started that way. Management blames the huge applicant volume and poor quality after bad hiring experiences, creating an ironic situation because the policy would have excluded the author before they later earned a degree. It is shared as a reaction to debates about degree requirements, self-taught programmers, and the difficult junior job market.

• @gentoomemes / 10152 2024-03-26