I regret spending just 3 years to get a Certificate/Diploma in EE. I hate to think how much of my parents' money I used getting a piece of paper. I've never tried to become a PE, but if I did I would have very little range of choice if I wanted to work as an engineer. Getting a job on a Help Desk is not so difficult. I could even get a job doing field work. But anyone who wants to have a life would want to avoid doing blue collar work.
True. We go to work and interact with those bipedal lifeforms, trying to model their behaviour and thinking, with randomised state machines. It's not so bad when they keep changing their methods trying to get a result. But when they keep changing their objectives, the engineer has to start all over again. And they wonder why it takes so long.
But one can always pretend to be something else, like a salesman. On the weekend we can go home and build robots. No-one need ever know about our little "habit".
That's right for teenagers. Some of us spend our spend time pulling things apart to see how they work, and making things instead of chasing the opposite sex. We mis-spend our youth studying while the humanities students go to parties, build contacts and have a life. What hope do we have when we leave the education system and have minimal experience with people? The emphasis in our modern world is on good customer service. Customers don't seem to care if they're getting good value, a quality product or if their problem gets fixed. As long as they're getting good customer service they're happy for now. The salesman pockets his commission and laughs about the scam he just pulled on the customer. It's the poor engineer who has to go and sort out the mess later when the customer realises all is not well.
Sig: "Whether you believe you can do a thing or not, you are right." -Henry Ford