@morbiuswilters said:
I've seen good programmers with degrees in English, Music, Art or with no degree at all.
I knew of one place where having a CS degree informally disqualified you for developer interviews. The teams (and interview panel) experienced many prima donna CS grads that presumed their degree bestowed complete knowledge upon them and stubbornly refused to budge from their outdated ways.
Graduates in chemistry, maths, physics seemed to provide the best talent pool: pretty good analytic skills, no preconceptions about how stuff should be done so were accepting of being shown the corporate way, and were familiar with computer usage but still regarded them simply as a tool to achieve a goal.
Some years ago I "interviewed" my team-leader's mate - for a position that didn't exist. He had a presentation that was incompatible with our systems so couldn't be shown[1], had a business card burned onto a CD which refused to play[2], and couldn't show me his website he'd designed and built himself because the code shat out by FrontPage rendered differently on netscape[3]. Despite his enthusiasm for things technical, he was clearly shaken when finding out his untested stuff would only display in specific circumstances.
[1] he'd designed it for a 1024x768 layout; our projectors only went up to 800x600
[2] more likely a fault with our crap CD-ROMs; they were quite picky about some burned CDs. Nonetheless, he didn't think to carry around any dead tree editions.
[3] he used VBscript to handle page navigation with no graceful degrade. And FP had also presented a full range of different typefaces to him that weren't available on stock installations so everything was Times Roman.