Personal experience on this. My degree (physics) was nearly completely orthogonal to my career (software engineer).

But I have no doubt it helped me get not just my first job, but also subsequent ones, probably due to 'his code/tech talk could be better, but he seems smart and has a physics doctorate from a prestigious institution'.

Think software hiring+quality would be much better if we had an apprecticeship culture, instead of based on perceived prestige from excelling at University.