The flip side of this is: currently, most engineering fields require you to have some kind of professional certification (eg. a PE) from an industry "guild", eg

The flip side of this is: currently, most engineering fields require you to have some kind of professional certification (eg. a PE) from an industry "guild", eg. the ASCE. Software engineers don't really have a functional equivalent. We demand that professional engineers build our bridges, but we'll pretty much let anyone build our software. At some point, changing that may be the responsible thing to do.