I doubt any profession for which the tools evolve as fast as programming can have "standards and rigor". Another root cause is that abilities of people (in any

I doubt any profession for which the tools evolve as fast as programming can have "standards and rigor". Another root cause is that abilities of people (in any field) are hard to compare. Programming (and other) professions are in fact team efforts, and while we there are some assessments for individual abilities, good luck assessing abilities of teams before forming. Not sure it is a problem to solve at this point: we care about the results and we have a lot more working software than 20 years ago, so something goes well.