There's a lot of the rider's bias leaking through here. "Men who seemed to be of higher social class", "Middle Class Men", complete assumptions and biases that aren't used to form any sort of conclusion. Frustrating in an otherwise enjoyable and interesting essay.
I work at AWS in the UK and also do interviews in a Software Engineering role. I have no CS degree and at least where I am we do not look at degrees. We are hiring btw.