I mean, programmers also don't go through a medical school equivalent or residency. We don't take boards. I'm married to a doctor and we were together through her time in medical school and residency. If I had to choose between skill checks in the interviewing process and the 8 grueling years of hell that was med school and residency, I will take option 1 without a second of consideration.
There are developers who went through a master or PhD at a top school, with a similar difficulty and debt to medical school.
There are companies who will only hire you if you got a degree and relevant experience. The big tech companies never mention it but most of the workforce had a long education.
>>> I've never seen post-grad requirement for a dev unless it's a cutting edge research position and they need PhD's from the problem domain.
I've seen it in almost every place I worked for in London. The floor is either only people with degrees or only people with no degrees.
The degree is never announced as a requirement, it's rather selected automatically during the interview. For instance in programming, some questions about state machines and graph traversal will do a wonderful filter.
Master's and PhDs in CS are typically not focused primarily on coding skills though. These individuals have a degree and publications that speak primarily to their conceptual expertise, which is important and significant but if the job they're interested in is mostly coding, that's an entirely separate skill. I know CS PhDs who didn't write a single line of code for their thesis.
Going back to the medical analogy, just because someone has a medical degree doesn't mean they're a good surgeon. They'd need additional certification to prove their surgery skills.
