I don't see this mentioned anywhere, but one very important difference between programmers and the other professions is that doctors and lawyers have not only a

I don't see this mentioned anywhere, but one very important difference between programmers and the other professions is that doctors and lawyers have not only a high bar to entry, but a legal monopoly. There is outsourcing of legal review and radiology, but still not on the scale of programming. There's also the matter that doctors save lives, and lawyers either bring justice to the aggrieved, or keep you out of jail. OK, most of them actually don't do those things, but those are the images we have in our minds, and that's part of what makes them respectable. If we professionalized and forced anyone calling themselves a programmer to meet a very high bar of competence, things would look pretty different. The median salary would be higher. My guess is that we wouldn't see anything like the dynamism of the startup community. Think of how slow-moving and conservative both medicine and the law are compared to programming. You could argue that that's not a bad thing, but it would certainly be very different. I would love to see the top programmers get respect for doing what they do, instead of having to become marketers, but I'm just not sure it's how the world works. To make money, you have to convince someone else to give it to you. Most people working in a job only make it linearly because they only have a relationship with one customer. Many more fortunes are made by figuring out how to serve MANY customers than are made by finding a single customer with very deep pockets who needs you badly.