I've been given jobs over stronger candidates simply because of my engineering degree even though I didn't specialise in computer science nor electronics, but rather applied maths which is not that useful for most software enterprise setups.
In terms of my experience, several self-taught people I've worked with simply did not have solid theoretical backgrounds - explaining how a DB uses Btrees to store data got me blank stares, order complexity and algorithms were clearly not strong points with them, binary math they struggled with, anything low level was greek, but they were hard working and willing to learn.
Most of these things can be self-taught in any case, so if these things are a requirement for getting the work done, then that should be tested in the interview rather than to discriminate based on degree or no degree.