I imagine for junior positions this matters more.
Anecdotally, I know at least one friend without a degree who gets the same amount or more recruiter emails sans any degree on his profile
One place even went so far as to limit the acceptable majors. CS and CE only, not even EE was acceptable. Nevermind that EE is often in the same department and some people may have gone to schools without dedicated CS programs. Exceptions could only be made if the candidate was a direct referral and that person really went to bat for you.
It's total nonsense. I have a CS degree myself and it hasn't informed my professional work at all. I don't find myself referring back to my databases coursework where we used a made-up non-SQL language or my operating systems class which was about punch cards and paper tape OSes (and this was in the early 2000's, not 1975!).
If I can bypass that step and talk to a dev or experienced manager I get at least one interview every time. For companies using software like Greenhouse in their recruiting pipeline, I _never_ make it through to even a phone screen without an internal shove by someone.
Almost everywhere I've ever worked, I've been considered a strong hire. Mid-level dev.
For some jobs this was a good thing, for other jobs it didn't matter.
I've had jobs where my manager didn't have a CS degree, one of them I had to sit him down and explain why his ad-hoc database made out of .txt files and thousands of lines of C# code wasn't a good idea. A CS degree forces you to know about a broad range of ideas and tools (e.g. databases). This is useful. Employing someone with out that means they may have holes in their knowledge that you aren't expecting to be there. But give this person some motivation and a week and they'll get up to speed.
Despite my lack of degree, I tend to be one of the more CS-oriented people on the teams I join. I put this upfront in my portfolio & github with the projects I show off, namely that I've written an ORM, a Web Server, games with AI using game trees and behavior trees, contributed to some popular OSS, etc...even some random odd stuff like emulators, disassembler scripts, pentest tools, etc.,
I guess I do have some gaps but I'm constantly trying to fill them and I'm not satisfied to rest on that knowledge.
So as to your question; Yes, it happens routinely, in my Canadian job market. At both the junior and senior level. Many positions won't even reply if they don't see the degree on your resume. I make it explicit in interviews just to get it out there because I have had too many unpleasant situations where the degree was at first assumed and then revealed to not be there. Reactions vary.
In the end I've had a successful career, but with some struggle. I work at Google now. But mostly only because I came through acquisition. I would not even be considered for an interview otherwise. I have faced some small internal attitude over not having a degree, tho only a little bit.
There are other things that result; grads from CS programs spend a lot of time in algorithms course studying the kinds of things that get asked as skill testers in job interviews but then almost never used in the real world again. (Not to say I haven't studied these algorithms, but studying them in school I think helps respond in the way an interview expects.) That also affects employability. And more and more because this is the direction more and more interviews are taking.
Granted, there needs to be a filter. However, how many algorithms does one need to memorize to be a good programmer? Is knowing how red-black trees work going to make one successful? Or is knowing how hash tables work Under the surface going to make one successful? Or is just being able to use the Hash data structure provided in Ruby good enough?
It was usually just a phone screen, an in person, a few questions to see if you were full of shit, and then call references. Ta da!
If you don't have a degree there's a good chance you won't get past the initial screening at some companies. In practice, if you get dozens of applicants for the same position you may be looking for excuses not to bring people in. And there are some companies that have a famously academia-focused culture, like Google. While most startups say that they don't care about degrees, the reality is that somebody with little experience who happens to have a CS degree from Stanford has a lot of doors open to them, especially in a place like Silicon Valley where so many founders -- and VCs -- are Stanford grads. This has happened to me more than once. Recruiter emails aren't a good measure for this; a dismaying number of recruiters only contact you based on keyword matches against your profile, and don't actually look at your resume. (Hence why I regularly get emails looking for contract Java developers in the northeast US, despite the fact that I'm a technical writer with a full time, non-contract job in Mountain View.)
I suspect there's going to be more of a focus on degrees going forward, not less, simply because it seems like more and more people are going to "developer boot camps" and trying to get out on the market without a CS background. I don't have a CS background, so I don't want to say that's necessarily a bad thing, but I suspect in a year or two we'll be creating more tech job seekers than tech jobs, and as the market tightens, screening will get more stringent. People with stellar track records are still going to get work, degrees or not, but people who are "merely good" may find that a degree tips things in their favor.
About 9 interviews later over 4 spread-out days, I was told I had done quite well during the interview process. Eventually I was not given the position because 1. I did not have a degree, and 2. I was holding a beer in my LinkedIn picture.
They ended up paying my current employer (their vendor at the time) astronomical amounts of money to do the very same service, done by me, on-site. I still do it.
Go figure.
Edit: I am in hardware-side, not a developer.
What I have seen being done though, not just to me, is companies using no degree as an excuse to underpay for a position. This usually only works with experienced people like myself. The company says, "ok, he seems like he can do the job, but he doesn't have a degree. That's good, because we can take 10-20k off the salary for the position and still get roughly the same level of work out of him."
Also, if I am ever doing contract/job searching, it's usually word of mouth. If a company requires me to resubmit my resume in their wierd online portal and reenter every detail about myself in someother HR system to make it past the HR gods, I don't even bother with them. I'm guessing places like that would be more likley to weed out non-degree holders, while word of mouth/good ol boy network jobs are much more about your experience.
You mostly just don't get phone screens, and this is mostly from larger companies where the HR drives the initial recruitment.
TLDR version: you may have to deal with lower salaries, less respect, lower quality organizations or departments, lots of free time catching up/keeping current, more questioning compared to degreed peers, and occasional culture shock. Not everyone deals with all/any of those, but chances are higher with no degree.
Needless to say, my degree is now on my CV again, so people can go back to not asking me about it.
No, never. Not even for jobs that listed a degree as a requirement.