Samputio

@Samputio, I think things have gotten too far along the off-beaten path.
 
At the end of the day, I feel that software development is a highly technical skill that you attain either through formal training (i.e., school) or through experience and self-learning. And in any technical field, the people who get ahead are those who continue to learn and refine from what they've done. Or at the very least, have the ability to understand there is room for improvement and seek out where those improvements could come from.
 
As long as you're competent enough in what's being asked and can adjust to how the company does things, it doesn't really what the requirements are. The requirements on job postings are the ideal candidate and likely to weed out the people who don't have anything to show for to make up for the lack of hard meeting those requirements. However I'd still avoid going through the job board unless you meet most of those, since there's likely an automated filtering process that will drop your application if you don't put down certain key words (and you can't really fake those key words).
 
But then again, I feel that everyone's replies here, mine included, are just interpretations of what they've experienced. It's all true, but your millage may vary if you want to work for a company.

All of the people in my computer science class were using xml to store data, no one used git or were even taught it and we were shown only OOP.
 
Good code comes with putting in effort not sitting in a lecture being taught visual basic and store information in xml rather than a database.

None of the skills you listed, including writing good code, is dependent on if a person has a degree. 

It makes sense that a top 100 company would prioritise degrees for the sole purpose of saving resources, because those who have finished a degree have gone through a defacto filter, I get that part. 

Does a completed computer science degree come even half way close to guaranteeing a person will come away with the ability to write good code and to hit those requirements you've listed? By most accounts, the answer is a big no. I have seen this sentiment from @vorticalbox more than I have seen its counterpart.  
 

I don't understand how someone can think of going into a programming field of any kind without daily experience with the things you listed @Brenz, it's contradictory how it all hinges on having a degree which in itself doesn't seem to do a good job at actually instilling the very practices you've laid out. 

Of course, I'm not pointing out contradiction in your comment, it's the way the industry is currently shaped that is contradictory. High quality, free, open source education is on the rise and eventually employers will find themselves dipping into the pool. If I was an employer I'd be keeping a more watchful eye on on that space. 

That is because you often learn a broad range of things in your area of major when going to school, but when on the job you learn specialized stuff like using their tools, software, etc. So you you learn very important things for THEM, and it might even carry over to other companies, but in general you always learn a lot of useful information when moving to a new job. That is just because of all the variables at play.
 
So lets take a look with a problem I have actually seen recently. If you look at someone in cyber security doing level 1 triage work. If they don't have a good education they still might be able to do the job true. The problem is for example I have 2 new employees. One got in because of certain situation around his circumstances and the other came here fresh from college.
 
They both have learned the tools and can do a decent enough job... that is until something new pops up or a problem occurs. The non-educated employee has a very hard time figuring out what to do, because all he knows is the little information he picked up here. The person with an education though... understands how the things leading up to his role work. He understands the networking behind it, the common tactics used by the opposing side, and just have a very broad knowledge of things he might encounter.. so in general he doesn't get tripped up by these things, but instead responds to them appropriately.
 
The person without an education actually makes day to day things harder on people of higher levels. Where as the person with one is much more self-sufficient. Can you guess which one will get promotions and have a long lasting stay with the company?
 
This isn't an uncommon thing and is generally why education DOES matter and is becoming more important. More and more jobs are asking for a degree, pay is becoming more and more reliant on your education level. If you want to advance inside a big company then you also will need to advance your education level. Sure you can land a job in HR for example with a 2 year degree, but if you want to ride that career path to an executive level position then you have better completed a grad school program.

To add to this, and it's anecdotal, all of my career building jobs except one I got because I knew someone. Most of them were from referrals.
 
And aside from my very first career job (which was an internship), nobody asked me about my education or what I did at school. They just wanted to know if I knew what I was doing.

If you can get a programming job right now, do so. It will give you real world experience and money. If you can afford to get a degree, consider starting courses. You may or may not learn, you may or may not finish, but the odds of it being a good investment are favorable - unlike a liberal arts degree, a bachelor's in computer science should be able to pay for itself fairly quickly assuming you didn't pursue courses at an exorbitantly expensive college. Get scholarships, get grants - spend the time and effort to get that free money.
 
It is fair to think of a degree as an insurance policy - if you can't get a job without it then its well worth it, if you get a job and didn't need it it will still likely increase you salary enough to pay for itself, and if you land something awesome and never end up needing to complete it - then you can afford the wasted dollars. But the main thing is to start hustling and looking for roles early - it takes several years, possibly painful ones, to ramp up and start climbing the compensation ladder and the longer you wait the more it will suck especially as your life priorities change.

Anyone can write code, the difficult bit is writing good code. Yes you can come up with some projects and put them on GitHub but who is to say the code is actually good?
 
I graduated University ~4 years ago in the UK, started in an entry level role and now lead a team of software engineers in a FTSE 100 company. Truthfully when I'm interviewing we will rarely have anyone in without a qualification of some kind, a personal portfolio is a welcome addition but I've seen some awful stuff in some personal GitHub accounts but we have a few within our department who didn't get a software engineering degree and either started at a small company or started in a different department and learnt what they needed to move into Technology.
 
As others have mentioned as well its not just about writing code, there are a number of other skills you need. I posted this list before but when interviewing I'm looking for all of these things:
 
Code standards - Learn what good code is and stick to it Frameworks - Don't try reinventing the wheel. Cover front-end and back-end Databases - You need somewhere to store data. Look at query optimisation & replication Linux - You're going to be connecting to a Linux server using SSH at some point Security - Do not forget this! Know how to write secure code, stay up to date on the OWASP Top 10 and know what encryption is suitable and when to use it  Software Development Methodologies Software Development Life Cycle Testing - Unit & Functional Continuous Automation / Delivery / Deployment Version Control - Git Other Standards - e.g PHP-FIG PSRs  

Schools failing to teach what the real world is like, that seems to be a problem in general.
 
Though a lot of the what was listed in that post is either company specific or is not really useful or relevant in a wider schema of things. I find it more useful to be able to adapt quickly to what the company does rather than try to soak in as much as possible, only to find out you only really need like 10% of what you accrued. It is useful to know what those are on a higher level detail, but it's not useful to know anything specific unless you really need it.
 
Just picking one:
Every company or employer I've worked for uses SVN. So taking the post at face value and learning only Git would've done me diddly squat.
 
Besides that, I'd imagine most companies hire new people on the presumption they'll need a week or two to get used to how they do things.  So overall, I feel that it's kind of useful to know what those topics are, but those may or may not be of any actual use. Instead it's better to be able to quickly adapt to how the company does things.