Of course the difference was I was hiring in the market place for people to produce things in sufficient quantity and quality that the company would make more money than the salary. If I hired because of a degree and not capability, both of us would likely be gone. In academia, it is the reverse that hiring for capability over the degree would likely cause both to be gone.

Cowen, James…Cowen.

Fixed. My brain knows his name, but my fingers are decidedly more familiar with "Cohen."

On one hand, I find that people who aren’t medical doctors who refer to themselves as “Dr. So And So” are about to tell you a whopping great lie, perhaps as part of a scam or sales pitch. On the other hand, I am equally annoyed by medical doctors who run for elected offices and campaign as “Dr. Blah Blah”. Both uses are pretentious.

The title "Doctor" comes from the Latin for "teacher." It was used for roughly half a millennium by learned academics before it was adopted by physicians who were, at that point in history, relative amateurs.

I used the title "Dr." when I taught college to differentiate myself from the students and used it as a defense contractor where everyone else had a title before their name. I don't use it in the think tank world because it's simply not customary, likely because pretty much everyone has a PhD or comparable expertise in the policy world. (I do have the degree suffix PhD on my business card but that's pretty standard.)

I agree that it's pretentious to use it out of context of one's expertise. Otherwise, though, it's a hard-earned honorific.

he’d never get hired with just a MS, even though he had 30+ years of experience designing and building water and wastewater conveyance and treatment systems

The insistence on a PhD for the vocational-technical departments of the university always struck me as silly. It probably makes sense in a graduate program, if the desire is to teach cutting edge critical theory, but not in a basic undergraduate program.