The guild system lives on in a way in the skilled trades. An electrician or plumber goes through specific career stages. My son apprenticed learning how to make

The guild system lives on in a way in the skilled trades. An electrician or plumber goes through specific career stages. My son apprenticed learning how to make beer. It also lives on in the military. I think programming would benefit from an apprenticeship stage -- I had great mentors assigned to me early in my career but that seems to have gone away. The meritocratic nature of programming attracted me to it (as a young nerd with an incomplete degree in military history). If you could do the work you got paid and promoted, and companies would put in the effort to train and mentor juniors back in the day (or maybe I got lucky and feel nostalgic for an imaginary past). I saw the credential craze come and then mostly fade away (I got Oracle, Novell, and DEC certifications). Now I see companies insisting on CS degrees. My early programming heroes didn't seem to use titles -- Dennis Ritchie, Ken Thompson, Brian Kernighan. I suppose Bell Labs gave them titles but when I read their papers they just used their names. Rob Pike calls himself a programmer -- when he presented Go at OSCON a long time ago he introduced himself as a "programmer at Google." Maybe a humblebrag, but if you can walk the walk you don't need to show off with a fancy title. I think we shouldn't get hung up on titles, or use them to gatekeep or judge.