I have no doubt that professionalization is highly related to social and political savvy. The ability to form an "in-group" and commit to doing what is in the

I have no doubt that professionalization is highly related to social and political savvy. The ability to form an "in-group" and commit to doing what is in the interests of this group (thus solving the free-rider problem) is an essential social skill. However, when groups professionalize in the sense of restricting the supply of people to that job, they are benefiting their own in-group at the expense of society as a whole (customers, employees and shareholders, people excluded from the profession, and indirectly, everyone else). Tech workers intuitively recognize this, and professionalization is the antithesis of hacker culture. In fact, I would say that professionalization wouldn't actually help the nerdy people you are referring to. It would just bring in different people (of course the social justice movement is already working hard to eliminate hacker/nerd culture from the tech industry). As this article shows, tech workers are fighting this issue through the legal system. Maybe a union will be needed just to deal with this issue. I suspect that the rivalry between Google and Facebook, and the fear of further lawsuits, will keep competition rigorous in the short term.