that's particularly interesting what you say. i totally agree, of course, and offer myself as a counterexample in the service of core-robber rating evidence.
the major part of my adult life, my career, if that's what it was, was in the pursuit of design. not as a direct employee, but as a contractor hired to do specific work. i had opportunities a couple times to leave the road and take work as a direct employee with the job title design engineer, but i liked being footloose.
almost always the job description for the assignment i took was design engineer and the project was almost always a fixed wing aircraft of some sort. once i did a fair amount of design work on the tail section and cargo-ramp-and-door of the v-22 tilt rotor and later did some minor modification work on military helicopters. attempted once to break into automotive work doing mainly body parts and the instrument panels for a star-crossed trash truck project. but all the rest was aerospace vehicles from business jets to airliners and military planes to mod projects on the structure of the suits we use for spacewalking. i worked alongside degreed engineers doing the exact same things they were doing, but my degree was in english. (hey, can i help it if english and engineering have the same abbreviation? i ask you now.)
okay, okay. i spelled it out: E N G L I S H, and it cost me jobs a number of times, i'm sure. but i hope to face my folks in the afterlife if there is one, and my dad would kick my ass from heaven to hell and back, or vice versa, if he caught me lying. just on the safe side i try hard to stay out of that.
anyway, i say all this stuff to try to give the picture. the projects i worked on were some of the most major aircraft of the generation. top business jets and airliners and a plane that keeps our fleets safe from our president's closest allies. names like cessna and gulfstream. boeing and airbus. the old grumman company. sometimes structure work. sometimes flight control or environmental control (think air conditioning, wing de-icing, cabin air pressure, for starters). sometimes working alongside some of the best design people in the nation. some knew my degree was in english and i needed more help than most, but lots of people i worked with had no idea that i wasn't brought along the same or similar as them. truth was i had almost no hours in engineering of any sort.
so why am i saying all this? because this is exactly the counterpoint to the truth you stated, hugo. as a group we are highly compartmentalized in education and experience. i was famously not. i've studied all kinds of subjects and done lots of different stuff. and for that reason, largely, i usually rose quickly in whatever new place i was working to doing some of the most difficult and challenging work they were doing. in general design, i mean. in fact, i normally set a mental counter when i went somewhere new. if in x-amount of time i hadn't been spotted and a process of tasking-in-accordance hadn't begun, i set my tack to exit the place. the very fact that i had never experienced the classroom conditioning and workplace mentoring that aerospace is famous for gave me one hell of an advantage in many situations. every job i had was a new world for me, and i had to quickly begin my assimilation all over again. coming in fresh and largely unseasoned meant every possible solution was fair game to me and i didn't have much in the way of assumptions. contractors have encapsulated wisdom in the form of sayings to pass to the new generations. one of my favorites of the sayings says, if it's stupid, but it works, it isn't stupid.
i made a life of breaking molds, and it served me well. the educational and mentoring process was a harness that didn't fit me.