For what it's worth we don't consider candidates without a degree when we hire. It doesn't HAVE to be a CS degree - math or electrical engineering is close enough most of the time. But there's just so many job seekers without a degree and most of them are useless so we save a lot of time and effort simply ignoring those.
Useless as software engineers. We've had 'programmers' that could not FizzBuzz, ones that didn't know the difference between 0 and NULL, ones that could not read an E-R diagram, and so on. So these days when we hire a software engineer you don't get to round 2 if there's no degree on your resume.
