For the ones that are willing, they’ll gladly sponsor a degree pursuit and pay them more at completion, but the business environment puts a lot of pressure on creating a pay ceiling on uncredentialed employees
Oddly enough the engineering lead here is an uncredentialled engineer, but he was also the first employee 25 years ago so I suppose he is grandfathered in. Not that he doesn't deserve it either, he is wildly knowledgeable and capable.
You might have some form of diagnosable learning disability. If you get that diagnosed and then take it to a college's office of disability support services (or whatever the equivalent is), they'll set you up with a set of accommodations, which is generally things like more time on tests.
With that said, if you really like engineering, you can eventually get the PE with enough years' experience and get that pay increase. It may be worth it to you.
The world is in short supply of smart people like you. There is no shortage of people with degrees.
There is no doubt you can get a better paying job than $19 an hour doing something you find interesting.
You just need to put some of those learning skills into marketing/branding/networking.
I have prodded my boss about it and he more or less said that after our recent acquisition by parent company and parent parent company, things are very corporate by the book. It seems right now we're in a state where they are getting full engineering work at a 50-60% discount and I am getting to do engineering work despite being hired as a clock punching lab grunt.
A friend of my did a crash course boot camp for js, and did eventually get a good job out of it. Maybe I should think about doing the same.
I guess the flipside, in my experience it doesn't count as anything in the professional world. Since I back doored engineering, I am currently the technical lead on two projects at my job, both of which have vacant engineering lead positions - making me the defacto engineering lead. So I do the engineers work for technicians pay ($19/hr). I am also the only technician in the engineering dept. as opposed to the lab.
I should have just stuck with programming 20 years ago. Sorry this is a bit of a rambling tangent I went on. Maybe a warning to others that a degree is often more important than the knowledge the degree brings.