You want to charge $700 / hour for programming? You want to be a professional in the same sense as a doctor or a lawyer? Fine! 1. Get a PhD in computer science

You want to charge $700 / hour for programming? You want to be a professional in the same sense as a doctor or a lawyer? Fine! 1. Get a PhD in computer science or software engineering. 2. Submit to state licensing, certifications, fees, examinations and codes of conduct. 3. Buy liabilty insurance in case your screw-ups hurt someone and they sue your incompetent ass. Look, doctors and lawyers have been around at least since civilization arose, say six to ten thousand years. Programming as a profession independent of, say, doing math or building weapons systems or accounting has been around only since the 1950s, and it wasn't till the 1960s that large numbers of people got paid to do nothing but programming.