by Buscador » Thu Feb 26, 2015 7:48 pm
I hate to resurrect such an old thread, but I just saw the discussion between Jacked Camry and Orange Dragon a few posts back. I actually do know one engineer without a college degree, a friend from high school, but he is very much a special case. When he was in the U.S. Air Force, he had a technician's job that involved working with the nose cone instrumentation on spy planes. That's all I know, because the details were classified. As luck would have it, the training (and there were several months of specialized training) and work he had been doing applied directly to the very new field of cellular communications. He left the Air Force for a job as a a "cellular engineer" at Ericsson at a time when the very first students majoring in that particular discipline were still getting their Bachelor's degrees. He is still employed as an engineer 30 years later, but his lack of a degree did prove a hindrance into his advancement into management positions. He tried twice for a degree but could not get through calculus.
Other than rare cases such as this, however, where a discipline is still in its infancy and engineers are created the same way they were a few centuries ago, I completely agree that nobody could do the job required of an engineer without a degree, because they could never get the on-the-job training required--and hanging out with your dad would not cut it, unless you were being actively taught. I certainly would not want to be in a vehicle or large building that was based on plans developed by someone who couldn't pass a calculus course, but I'll happily use a phone that he designed.
As for programming, I know many programmers who have no degree. Many of them are quite good at what they do, but they are also limited in some ways when it comes to what might be considered core coding--developing operating systems or complicated algorithms or data structures, for instance. It is not impossible to acquire that knowledge without going to university, but it is very rare and it requires actively studying the same sources the person would have studied if they had attended university.
I hate to resurrect such an old thread, but I just saw the discussion between Jacked Camry and Orange Dragon a few posts back. I actually do know one engineer without a college degree, a friend from high school, but he is very much a special case. When he was in the U.S. Air Force, he had a technician's job that involved working with the nose cone instrumentation on spy planes. That's all I know, because the details were classified. As luck would have it, the training (and there were several months of specialized training) and work he had been doing applied directly to the very new field of cellular communications. He left the Air Force for a job as a a "cellular engineer" at Ericsson at a time when the very first students majoring in that particular discipline were still getting their Bachelor's degrees. He is still employed as an engineer 30 years later, but his lack of a degree did prove a hindrance into his advancement into management positions. He tried twice for a degree but could not get through calculus.
Other than rare cases such as this, however, where a discipline is still in its infancy and engineers are created the same way they were a few centuries ago, I completely agree that nobody could do the job required of an engineer without a degree, because they could never get the on-the-job training required--and hanging out with your dad would not cut it, unless you were being actively taught. I certainly would not want to be in a vehicle or large building that was based on plans developed by someone who couldn't pass a calculus course, but I'll happily use a phone that he designed.
As for programming, I know many programmers who have no degree. Many of them are quite good at what they do, but they are also limited in some ways when it comes to what might be considered core coding--developing operating systems or complicated algorithms or data structures, for instance. It is not impossible to acquire that knowledge without going to university, but it is very rare and it requires actively studying the same sources the person would have studied if they had attended university.