I think it's the other way round: most employers are subject blind, only a few need you to have specific degrees: Medicine, Law, Accountancy, Actuary, etc.

Technical jobs like coding require you to demonstrate ability, and therefore many people who have a not-quite right degree (physics degree to be a coder) or even no degree can get the job.

"Technical jobs like coding require you to demonstrate ability".

Yet they test you on an hour and a half online "coding challenge", which is completely irrelevant to day to day work. I have been looking for a senior level job recently and only one place has actually asked me questions that I consider relevant. In another I had to calculate the inersection of two rectangles for a Django job. I managed it, but it has nothing to do with my coding ability, knowledge of Pythonic / Django ways of doing things or anything that I would be doing on a day to day basis.

Yes, there's a high false negative rate incurred by doing it this way. I know what you mean, I actually did the same question not long ago (given the 4 corners, return the intersection area), and I too think it's irrelevant.

But it is definitely the case that someone who can't code could not possibly pass this test.

> for technical jobs you still need a technical degree

(EDIT: not sure if you were talking just about Germany. Below is for UK)

That's not 100% true. For prestigious technical jobs it might be. I've not exactly worked at Google etc but only about 70% of my colleagues/managers had degrees.