🚀 go-pugleaf

>I have been consulting as a contract engineer for a number of years.
>At many companies I worked for I was not "qualified" for the work I
>did. One aerospace company paid me well for two years for my
>"unqualified" efforts. My software flies in the A-320 and the F-15.
>
>In my opinion licensing is merely an effort to restrain trade.

This is a cynical but understandable opinion. Licensing of engineers
was begun because there were a number of "engineer" charlatans who
made their livings by defrauding the public. Some even promised to
make water flow up hill. The states have imposed licensing in an
effort to filter out the unqualified. It's not a perfect filter, but
it's much better than no control at all.

The other side of the coin is that excellent, well-qualified
engineers, degreed or not, are not "filtered in." Thus, the lack of a
license does not imply a lack of qualification. Nevertheless, a holder
of a state-issued engineering license is deemed qualified until found
to be otherwise--employers use their own filters to distinguish the
qualified from the unqualified.

>BTW I qualified as a Naval Nuclear Reactor operator with the highest
>orals in three years. (They put a special team on me with twice as
>many board members as usual. And three hours of questions instead of
>the usual one to one and a half hours) I have no degree.

Those such as you are rare. I have met and worked with only a couple
of non-degreed, but highly qualified, engineers. One was an RF
engineer who, to my knowledge, designed the world's first solid-state,
production, 400-watt, HF, wide-band, linear amplifier. The other is
currently a very capable radar systems analyst.

Just as the lack of a license doesn't imply an engineer is
unqualified, neither does the lack of a degree. The problem is there
are so many who would like to be called "engineer" but who are totally
unqualified that is is very difficult to separate the wheat from the
chaff. Degrees and licenses tend to make such decisions easy, but at
the expense of the very qualified, non-degreed, unlicensed engineer
who, by necessity, is forced to be an excellent salesman of his
skills.