🚀 go-pugleaf

/gnu-misc-discuss/wessels@thor.cc.nd.edu (Andy Wessels)/22 July 91:
    "[License & exam for programmers is analogous to bar exam]. This type
    of exam is a _professional_ certification.  Programmers are a
    _professional_ group of people."

No, the essential reason that lawyers & doctors are professionals is
that they are each organized as a powerful guild that controls entry
into their business, and enforces a code of "ethics" or professional
practice. Mandatory licensing is something these guilds have won from
the state to entrench their power.
 
Software people are not professionals because we have no guild, union,
or effective professional organization. We are not unified, and we
lack economic power. For example, the tax code was changed in a way
very detrimental to individual "consultants", and we weren't able to
stop it. Imagine this happening to lawyers.

Moreover, real professionals, as individuals, have a stronger loyalty
to their profession than to the organization that employs them. For
example, doctors don't think of themselves as employees; as a group,
they've managed to control hospitals, whereas other health workers
have been controlled by hospitals. Programmers (like many other
engineers) tend to act like employees, and to be treated legally like
employees.

In this discussion thread, the comment has been made several times
that restriction of entry is bad for the economy as a whole. Maybe so:
but professionalization hasn't stopped American medicine from growing
enormously, or advancing technically. Why should it be different for
software? And it seems obvious that the economic and status benefits
to the professionals, the doctors, have been great.