I dunno, there are still plenty of places where resi contracting in particular have pretty much zero requirements. A friend asked me to look at the sump pump wiring because his electrician told him his brand new sump pump had a short and it was at the bottom of 480 feet of rigid CPVC pipe. Turns out his electrician was totally illiterate and after forty+ years of wiring houses could not distinguish between "LINE" and "LOAD". Thus he had wired a lightning arrester rotated physically 90 degrees so that "L1" shorted directed to "L2" once the breaker was thrown. His electrician was stymied and decided the pump had a short to explain the immediate and quite energetic tripping when the breaker was engaged. (Dude's "meter" was a piece of 2x4 with a 120V doorbell nailed to it - touch wires to the two nails with leads wrapped around them and if the doorbell rings, there's voltage. Unfortunately doorbells don't come with continuity or resistance functions . . .) Point being that Johnny actually might be an electrical contractor, but without the amount of knowledge that you possess and consider to be the minimum to be an electrician, or at least an electrical contractor. But he might be competent within his own area of work and experience. He seemed to me to have an understanding reasonably commensurate with a residential electrical contractor who's not worked commercial or gone through a Union apprenticeship program.
Either way, it does highlight the dangers inherent within a professional technical forum. A lot of people feel it's just snobbery that electricians only help other electricians. But if one claims to be an electrician, there's a vast amount of knowledge that electricians assume one knows, and with electricity, what you don't know, but don't know that you don't know, can kill you. Hopefully Johnny is an electrical contractor and knows safety, he's just run into something outside of his own knowledge and experience.
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