>John,
>
>>Again, you can amass all of the theory you want. If you have never put it into practice, it means squat...
>
>It's a bit shortsighted, don't you think ? Let me ask you a question, Do you own a degree ?
>

It's not a matter of ownership, it's a matter of earning a degree. There are schools which, for a small sum of money, will be more than happy to sell you a degree.

It'd be difficult for John to attend law school at an accredited school in the US and not have an undergraduate degree of some sort; they'd not accept his application. I certainly don't have a degree in CS; my degrees are in Applied Mathematics and Psychobiology, and are now over 20 years out of date if the knowledge I picked up in either field had to be applied to the state of the art in these fields of endeavor, which have changed considerably since I was in school. Fortunately, I feel a certain obligation to keep somewhat current with the technologies I deal with in the day-to-day environment (well, at least decade to decade.)

I've learned more to respect the proven abilities of a candidate's work, in part indicated by their willingness to stick at a course of study, than to judge a candidate's worthiness based on their possession of a specific academic degree. The quality of the school awarding the degree is a large factor as well. Recognition of the outstanding caliber of work by one's peer group is another issue; the people who know something about a field are the ones best suited to making judgements about the skills exhibited by others in the field. And their knowledge of their field of endeavor, and their ability to distinguish between tools, technolgies and add-ins when asked about their qualifications and expertise is a factor as well.

I don't think that many of us would question JVP's understanding of VFP, VB, and their common technologies. The possession lack of either a graduate or undergraduate degree in CS would not be the basis for our judgement of his excellent accomplishments. I'd hate to think about the number of people I've interviewed, both on my own behalf and for clients, with a long string of TLAs and academic accolades strung behind their names who mentally were tossed in the "no clue - wrap up this interview quickly" category after a couple of minutes.

I can think of people with undergraduate (and perhaps graduate) accredation who probably would not be up to the task of holding his hat.