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Comment by Workaccount2 | Hacker News Reader

I am essentially a self-taught EE thanks to the internet. There is no shortage of engineers posting educational content, and no shortage of extremely knowledgeable engineers willing to directly help you with problems. I've done dozens of projects and even brought one to market.

I guess the flipside, in my experience it doesn't count as anything in the professional world. Since I back doored engineering, I am currently the technical lead on two projects at my job, both of which have vacant engineering lead positions - making me the defacto engineering lead. So I do the engineers work for technicians pay ($19/hr). I am also the only technician in the engineering dept. as opposed to the lab.

I should have just stuck with programming 20 years ago. Sorry this is a bit of a rambling tangent I went on. Maybe a warning to others that a degree is often more important than the knowledge the degree brings.

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My wife’s business has a number of self taught engineers. As management (everyone management started as an engineer), they have full faith in these people and love them. However, it causes them no end of pain that they never got their degrees as client contracts often require a credential to bill at higher rates.

For the ones that are willing, they’ll gladly sponsor a degree pursuit and pay them more at completion, but the business environment puts a lot of pressure on creating a pay ceiling on uncredentialed employees

I have associates degree in electronics tech and did go for my full engineering degree, but failed out...twice. I cannot for the life of me reliably pen-and-paper-clock-ticking solve complex equations. I even payed out the ass for a top tier tutor, no luck. I very firmly reached the "Maybe this just isn't for you" point. But with my own work and in my job, being really bad at high level calculus or diff eq has never even cropped up much less been a detriment (Well it does crop up, but in the SPICE simulator/circuit simulator).

Oddly enough the engineering lead here is an uncredentialled engineer, but he was also the first employee 25 years ago so I suppose he is grandfathered in. Not that he doesn't deserve it either, he is wildly knowledgeable and capable.

Are you able to do the homework (without aids) but not the test?

You might have some form of diagnosable learning disability. If you get that diagnosed and then take it to a college's office of disability support services (or whatever the equivalent is), they'll set you up with a set of accommodations, which is generally things like more time on tests.

As a college-educated engineer, I guarantee that you learned much more than I ever did during my formal training. The only useful things I've learned for my job was learned after college, when I actually had to know stuff to be successful!

With that said, if you really like engineering, you can eventually get the PE with enough years' experience and get that pay increase. It may be worth it to you.

I've always had a deep sense of respect for the hands-on engineers and technicians, the people that colloquialize an engine as a "motor," know the difference between a heat gun and a drill, and can wrench without needing a course on the Principles of Theoretical and Applied Screwdriver Mechanics.

You might have learned more in college than you suspect ... its hard to compare knowledge states before and after

I am sorry but that is just nonsense.

The world is in short supply of smart people like you. There is no shortage of people with degrees.

There is no doubt you can get a better paying job than $19 an hour doing something you find interesting.

You just need to put some of those learning skills into marketing/branding/networking.

Maybe if you bring the facts with a positive atittude to your employer they will be willing to recognize that you deserve a lead position, with matching salary, or at least something in between this and what you have now, even without a degree.

I'm actually looking for an out right now to respin my luck somewhere else. Right now I engineer by proxy, i.e. I do a design, document, or ECO and my boss stamps it (which frankly isn't too different than the other engineers, he ultimately stamps their stuff too).

I have prodded my boss about it and he more or less said that after our recent acquisition by parent company and parent parent company, things are very corporate by the book. It seems right now we're in a state where they are getting full engineering work at a 50-60% discount and I am getting to do engineering work despite being hired as a clock punching lab grunt.

Have you considered taking up programming now? In many ways, age is just a number.

Yeah, I have. The problem is that I really do love electronics. I am a decent C programmer, for embedded applications at least. I have never written an actual PC program though besides tutorial stuff.

A friend of my did a crash course boot camp for js, and did eventually get a good job out of it. Maybe I should think about doing the same.

you might want to check out the odin project... seems fairly high quality. or if that's not your jam i'm sure you could find a book or a course on something like coursera or udemy with varying success....

https://www.theodinproject.com/

This is a good resource, thanks!

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