From the opposite end of the spectrum, I'm always amazed at the jobs that slap on the computer science degree requirement. My small rural municipal government was recently looking for a web developer to work on their CMS. A CS degree was a requirement for the job, despite there being very little pure CS work to being with (it is your standard db-driven website).

I don't know, It struck me as odd. Why would this small government, in a low income area - average single income was $25K/year in a report a few years ago - restrict their search to people who are said to be in high demand and probably being courted by places like Google with interesting CS problems that they trained many years to work on? And as a taxpayer, why would I want to pay Google prices? It is a useful resource, but not $100K/year useful.

After several months they finally did find someone for the role. Though, I cannot say if they finally relaxed their CS requirement or not.

As someone who doesn't have a CS degree, I agree that it is frustrating to see hard requirements like this. But looking at it from the perspective of your "small rural municipal government", hiring developers is probably a pretty tough and scary endeavor. Lots of people hold themselves out as developers, and frankly, a lot of them are pretty bad at it.

How do you tell the bad ones from the competent ones? A CS degree at least gives you the guarantee that they at least had some training.

Now, I am sure it would be useful for a mechanic to understand all of the properties of the materials to manually derive the torque setting needed for a wheel bolt and all, but in reality, you just follow the book. The science behind the application is not particularly useful within this context.

Hiring is hard, but I think this goes back to the original submission: If all you look for is a physicist, you're going to miss the master mechanic. You might even end up with someone who has no interest in tearing down engines at all. Is that really the better member for your team?