Because we know that many of the really great people in computing/IT/database had not a single academic qualification in computing or in IT or in database. Surely we shouldn't restrict ourselves to people who have more academic qualifications in the field than Alan Turing or Fred Williams or Grace Hopper or John McCarthy or Tony Hoare or Ted Codd or Cliff Jones or Chris Date - if they hadn't been allowed to work in computing we wouldn't have got anywhere near where we are today - they might never have been a relational model to give rise to an RDBMS like SQL Server. Do you think that no-one should have been recruited to work on computers before about 1958, since there were no academic qualifications in Computing or IT way back then? :hehe:

If you had written "can sometimes be" instead of "are" the statement would have been believable; as you wrote it; it isn't. I've known people with first class honours degrees from some reputable universities who, despite having specialised in OO design and development using C++ in their final year, couldn't manage to write a working Hello world program during their interview (needless to say, none of those ones got the job); I've also interviewed people with similar degrees who had specialised in relational database theory in their final years, but didn't understand the terms "join", "foreign key", or "domain constraint" (again, they didn't get a job).

If only that were true. I guess that if the University or College is MIT or Stanford or Caltech or Oxford or Cambridge or Edinburgh or Manchester or NorthWestern (or certain others in several other countries) there is an extremely good chance that someone with a degree from there will be competent, but those places can't between them supply anything like enough candidates for computing/IT jobs to satisfy the demand and anyway there's not an absolute guarantee. In fact I would say that first degrees from most of those places are probably gameable (although not too easy to game), and even for Oxford and Cambridge you would want to see a good honours degree, not a pass degree or a poor grade of honours.

A bit up the chain from first job in junior/trainee position, after between one and four years in employment, track record is a far better indicator than academic qualifications. A bit further up again, maybe hiring chartered professionals (as suggested by Jane Dunn) would be sensible but I'm not convinced that chartered status is not gameable. (Just to make it clear that I'm not displaying sour grapes about chartered status, I'll point out that my non-academic qualifications include chartered status as CEng, CITP, and CMath.)