Engineer, PhD, technician (...) : if they don't read, learn about evolutions, standards (...), they are bad !
The first CMM has around 50 years old, if they don't know it, they can still use calipers...
This is and always will be my stance on people with college degrees:
Having a degree does not mean you're intelligent and know how to do your job. It just means you have the ability to sit through a class and regurgitate information back to a professor.
Out of the 40 something engineers I work with, I can only get intelligent information out of 3 or 4 f them
I find it funny how it works ('it' being this topic). "Society won't respect you if you aren't wearing a tie and have at least a BS". HR is probably the worst, they pass up on TALENT because their resumes is not decorated with fancy degrees, TALENT!
I tell you one thing they are good for: having me chase dimensions that mean nothing to what is actually the problem. I cant tell you how many times dimensions are out on a new part and they have me checking dimensions that have nothing to do with what is actually out. We do plastic injection molding and the engineer asked me to measure flatness on an older part so he knew what we could hold (for a tolerance) on the new part. I was dumbfounded, they are two different parts, two different molds, two different materials. How could the flatness of one part predict what another part could be? Its plastic, fool.
An engineering degree is the equivalent of a roll around tool box chucked full of tools. You can name all of them, you've touch most of them, but you really don't understand how to use any of them. The cost of the degree was the purchase of the tool box and tools, BUT only experience teaches you how to properly use them.