I fully agree, and being in tech has insulated me from many of the repercussions of not having a degree. Yes, there are a few non-negotiable "must have a bachelors in X" but I've not lost any sleep over those opportunities.

Having had the privilege of hiring for roles, my experience has been that fresh grads need so much hand holding and have trouble understanding a lot of "glue" concepts in CS, but they can... make crude a hashtable in Java? My favorite are those who can name and implement all the data structures but have no idea what they are actually for.

Part of the way the labor market has adjusted is that all businesses (not just elite or specialized ones) can say they that a 4-year degree is a requirement, even for ostensibly entry-level roles because there are just so many people with that degree and it's a convenient filter. When you have 1000 applications to fill a single $35,000/yr entry-level position, it's always going to be person with the most experience and willing to work for that. The numbers are not in their favor at all. The pandemic has forced a small readjustment in that businesses whining about not being able to find people are shocked to discover that nobody actually wants that $35K/yr job where they have be on site 5 days per week, get maybe 6 days of vacation per year, dubiously little sick time, and have to exist in a sweat-shop-esque open office floor-plan.

The movement to remove the paper ceiling is a noble one but it will be doomed to fail unless forgoing these candidates affect their bottom line. When writing job descriptions, I tend to mercilessly pair back requirements to one or two points that are absolutely essential for the role and most everything else can be omitted. I think this is something more companies can and should do (or selfishly, maybe not) because I've picked up some absolutely fantastic employees who were passed over due to some asinine reason like failing a contrived, live leet-code problem or were demonstrably clever but didn't have a degree.

But this is tech which exists in its own world right now, but I fear we are entering the era where it is becoming like any large industry with constantly rising barriers to enter as a new company and lower standards for workers as we begin an exponential race to the bottom. I am in my 30s and have access to many well-paying options, but I am starting to see the bottom fall out of the labor force in this industry where more experienced people are taking roles they are overqualified for and this ushering in of a new generation of tech workers is just not happening at the rate that we need. We hear that there are more tech jobs than there are tech workers to fill, well most of those are shit because the balance of compensation, expectations, and requirements are way off.

If I were just entering some non-tech industry, I would have lost all hope at this point with the media fearmongering AI as anything more than a smarter autocomplete and will only serve to further exacerbate the problem of not being able to find employment in order to simply have a modest lifestyle of renting a tiny apartment and being able to pay back the absolute mountains of student loan debt. Forget owning a home, going on vacation, having kids of their own, or achieving any other goal in life on a reasonable timeframe. What are these kids suppose to do? Maybe wait for an uncaring boomer congress to help relieve some student debt? Not with the current attitudes of, "well I paid mine back so screw you" all while conveniently ignoring the fact that educational costs have outpaced inflation, as well as wages relative to that, by orders of magnitude.

I don't know what they are suppose to do and it's fucking depressing.