I agree with you that the OP has selection bias, but I&#x27;d like to pick a nit in your example. Goldman Sachs does not generally require a degree for developers, which means that it&#x27;s not a suitable example for your argument. A better argument would be some Fortune 500 company that offers high salaries with a hard rule on credentials.<p>Goldman&#x27;s careers portal certainly makes it annoying to try and apply without one (but you can!), and of course their job ads mention it as a qualification, but I can tell you from personal experience they don&#x27;t require a degree. Google also lists a degree as a qualification for their engineering roles; they don&#x27;t care either.<p>Like almost every other credential in the software industry, a degree is mostly useful for getting to the actual interview as a blind, poorly networked applicant. But if you&#x27;re being invited to interview, or you contact a hiring manager directly - no, they don&#x27;t care.<p>While we&#x27;re on the topic, I&#x27;ll throw this in since a lot of the HN crowd seems to be unaware - if we are comparing salaries to financial companies primarily based in New York, you can make $300k at any large tech company like Google or Facebook once you&#x27;re at T5 or higher in New York. While finance companies can greatly inflate developer salaries beyond tech companies, $300k is not the floor at which you&#x27;d make that comparison.<p>That comparison is made in the seven figure salary range. The roles in that range are out of reach for general engineers at Google et al because they deal in specialized trading disciplines, which means they are still not comparable.<p>This leads me to the next note - all the large tech companies are pretty much explicitly ambivalent about degrees, even for landing an interview as a lowly, unconnected candidate.