23 year track record in semiconductor lab. it doesn't get much more hardcore than that...
i can give you oodles of 'outside the box' thinking .. like using laser focus light in a darkroom under a microscope to pinpoint the leaky pathway inside a chip.
Are these the typical achievements of non academic EE practitioners or is it just an anecdotal outlier? You get the point.
i had at least 15 collegues from all walks of life that had no 'paper' apart from the school of hard-knocks. One was a butcher... one lady learned finished college with french literature had two kids at age 18, went to mexico with a bunch of hippies, learned how to fix tv's from her husband did all kinds of stuff and retired at age 76 as head of a validation team that did signoff and final test of the RTL code for multimillion gate asics. Se could write VHDL and Verilog like the best of em. completely self taught.
i know a bunch of such people. They may not be 'typical' non degreed EE's but there is way more of em than you may think.
I've seen all kinds: degreed and non degreed and my experience is : that paper proves nothing, apart form the fact you fit the requirements to get the paper.
It does not tell me if you are genuinely interested in engineering at all , it does not tell me if you have brilliant idea's, it does not give me an indication of how creative you are ,it does not tell me how many things you have done on your own and built that were original.
It only tells me you belong to a group of people that followed a 4 year course and held it up till the finish line. Of course it does not preclude you having brilliant idea's or being a super creative person , but that paper does not guarantee that. Just like not having that paper doesn't preclude the same.
So if i am after someone who has original idea's and is a super creative mind to further my business that paper is irelevant.
If all i need is someone who can do a bunch of math i'll go get someone from the 'degree' pool. Maybe a mathematician.
Now, your experience may vary , and i don't know how it goes in 99% of the world but i can tell you this : come apply for a job in silicon valley and look around at what 'characters' are around here, and do a couple of job interviews .
Before i switched jobs half a year ago i did several interviews with different companies. Here's how it went : I walked in with a huge cardboard box with all the circuit boards i had made in my life, and samples of actual products that were in the stores that had my designs in em and copies of my published works. I would pour the contents on the table in the meeting room and wait for the interviewers to come in.
NOBODY ever asked if i had a degree and what it was. They were to busy digging in the pile of stuff.
One company showed me a bunch of their schematics and asked me if i could tell what the circuitry did. i looked at it for a few minutes and pointed out 7 or 8 mistakes in their design.
They asked me again if i could tell what the circuit did. i said ,yes , something that ain't going to be working quite right. they laughed and admitted those schematics were from a prototype before they debugged it and had found the issues i pointed out as well. And then i explained them in detail what that circuit did , how they could improve it and make it cheaper. At that point there was only one further questions: Not about education , not about degrees , just when i could start.
Everyone of the companies i interviewed with had an offer on the table within a few days. Only one HR guy remarked that i hadn't listed any university or degree on my resume. I asked him if that was a problem. He said no ,cause none of the interviewers had asked about it, it was just something that he found odd.
I've always worked in companies where nobody thought any less of another because of a lacking piece of paper. Show what you can do, don't tell me.