It really strongly depends on what you're writing. There's a world of difference between hacking together a social networking web app and building software for

It really strongly depends on what you're writing. There's a world of difference between hacking together a social networking web app and building software for a flight guidance system. Professional accreditation and training may well be wasted on social web app coders, but I sure wouldn't want to fly in an airplane that was controlled by a weekend hacking project written by someone who just learned their first programming language the day before...