Comment What's important (Score 1) 266
I can't speak for any other workplace, but when I go through resumes I pay very little attention to the "Education" section. This is due to encountering so many people with Bachelor degrees in Computer Science that can barely write "Hello World" when asked to, and Masters degrees who can't write a simple recursive script to crawl a directory structure and do X to files with criteria Y. Putting it bluntly, college degrees have lost their credibility.
The industry I am in is network performance; I'm in QA. We need people who understand IP networking, who are good enough with Linux to administer their own test machines and get around on the command line of our (Linux-based) product, and who can write test automation scripts in Perl, Python, or bash. When I interview someone, I ask them to write a couple of very simple scripts in the language of their choice. I give them a couple of straightforward network-based problems (hint: the answer is that it's not working because of NAT). I ask a couple of simple Linux questions. And it's still damned hard to find anyone who can even do THAT, regardless of what their degree or GPA is.
In other words, at least from my perspective, the lack of a degree isn't an issue. What's important are specific skills, the ability to discuss them, and to demonstrate that they can perform those skills. Having projects that you can point to (such as a t1.micro instance in Amazon EC2 that's a fully-functional LAMP system that you can give a tour of, and demonstrate skills upon) is important. If coding skills are being claimed, something on Sourceforge that can be examined is good. Breaking in to the tech industry is very doable, and people are doing it all the time. But you have to have something that gets you past the first filtering session of resumes, and projects is the best way of doing that.
Suggestion: since your friend seems heavily Web-oriented, have him find a local non-profit group that interests him that has a crappy website. You can figure out what step 2 is... bam. Instance experience and project people can look at, complete with warm fuzzies for helping out a nonprofit.
And once he has his first tech job on his resume, the degree (or lack thereof) becomes much less important. Your degree gets you your first job, but not your second; after that, it's almost purely experience and references that matters. Recent password issues nonwithstanding, LinkedIn is a major pathway for getting into tech. It's served me very well, as well as most of my techy friends, and showing the initiative of tracking down recruiters on LinkedIn will eventually pay off with an interview.
Of course, the best way to get an interview is personal recommendations. Unless the hiring manager is a friend, the friend can only get you the interview; you still have to convince the manager and the rest of the team to take you on.