There are many great developers who did not get CS degrees. Might be an unpopular thing to say, but in my experience interviewing a lot of applicants, the majority of applicants who don’t have CS degrees are not in that category.

It’s always great to find a diamond in the rough who has been passed over by other companies for lack of degree and is looking for an opportunity to shine.

On the whole, a CS degree is directionally correlated with being more likely to have a good understanding of the fundamentals, algorithms, and other important context that helps more as the problems get hard. These things can all be learned by someone without a CS degree, but in my experience being open to interviewing non-traditional applicants it’s more common for the self-taught applicants to be more trial and error type devs who got to this point by experimenting and seeing what works.

I always have to give the blanket disclaimer that a CS degree does not guarantee a great dev and a lack of CS degree does not mean the dev is not good. However, I honestly can’t say that a CS degree is not correlated with better developers on the whole. I choose to interview non-traditional applicants who don’t have CS degrees, but to be entirely honest I can’t fault companies who get a lot of applicants who start prioritizing those with degrees.