I've seen this abused so badly though--our compliance person in HR was asking me to help write one a while back for a candidate that had a BS in mechanical engineering and no relevant work experience, claiming that a course the applicant had that taught MATLAB was sufficient experience for a role as an android dev.
LOL. You don't know what you are talking about at all.
I have a degree in physics but I have been programming since I was 10. From what I can tell, my programming skills and experience are no less than someone who graduated with a master in CS at a major university.
"Qualified" by whom? By universities? Fortunately, in SE the code talks loud and clear, and discriminatory rent seekers need to invoke the violence monopoly to get their way.
I totally agree on the sophistication--I did a ton of HPC work for my masters thesis.
But a class where you had to write some code to do basic finite element analysis or solve linear systems doesn't make you qualified work on a distributed software system.
