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Once you have those years of experience, without too much hopping around most recruiters will stop looking at your education more and more. It's far more interesting to note what company someone worked for and what work they did, then it is to see what they were doing all those years ago. Still though, when a recruiter gets a lot of applications, filtering on education is one of the two easiest things to do... but the other one is filtering on the years of experience. Which of those two will win out in general I can't tell you, but I think it's fair to say that getting a job at the most popular companies will be harder, because they will simply higher the person who is 5 years older than you are and has both the degree and the experience (and once you get to 20 years of experience vs 25 years... it really doesn't matter that much anymore).

Once you have those years of experience, without too much hopping around most recruiters will stop looking at your education more and more. It's far more interesting to note what company someone worked for and what work they did, than it is to see what they were doing all those years ago. Still though, when a recruiter gets a lot of applications, filtering on education is one of the two easiest things to do... but the other one is filtering on the years of experience. Which of those two will win out in general I can't tell you, but I think it's fair to say that getting a job at the most popular companies will be harder, because they will simply higher the person who is 5 years older than you are and has both the degree and the experience (and once you get to 20 years of experience vs 25 years... it really doesn't matter that much anymore).

Getting hired without experience

This is without a question the hardest part. Most people I have seen succeed start with freelance non-engineering work during their last education, and then score their first full time job through some connection. My fiancee's sister is currently studying CS and a lot of her classmates got 'hired away' from their degree during their internships. Personally after high school and before university I got hired based on a portfolio of personal projects I made. When people say that X% of companies will reject you out of hand, this is the phase during which that is true. Personally I didn't do any engineering related formal education (figured I already knew that well enough) and by this point I got hired multiple times within a week, but that's definitely not the case at the start. Being self taught frankly requires a lot of self motivation that most don't have.

Given such a youth I can fairly confidently say that most recruiters and companies will give a lot of value to those years of experience. Especially if at least 3 of those years were at a single company. That means that the person in question is reliable and capable enough that a company wanted to keep him or her. Something that a university degree in no way guarantees (even though finishing a good university definitely says something about intellect). Still though, there is an incredibly important cultural aspect to this, where some countries value degrees more and less. A weak proxy for this is the abundance of titles used in general unrelated communication. In central Europe I have seen people introduce themselves as "Doctor of Philosophy Last Name" when talking to a nurse in the hospital for the additional respect it gets them, whilst in north western Europe this would be highly frowned upon and seen as highly eccentric or even inappropriate.

Given such a youth I can fairly confidently say that most recruiters and companies will give a lot of value to those years of experience. Especially if at least 3 of those years were at a single company. That means that the person in question is reliable and capable enough that a company wanted to keep him or her. Something that a university degree in no way guarantees (even though finishing a good university definitely says something about intellect). Still though, there is an incredibly important cultural aspect to this, where some countries value degrees more and less. A weak proxy for this is the use of academic titles in non-academic settings. In central Europe I have seen people introduce themselves as "Doctor of Philosophy <FirstName> <LastName>" when talking to a nurse in the hospital for the additional respect it gets them, whilst in north western Europe this would be highly frowned upon and seen as highly eccentric or even inappropriate.