[throwaway38235]

It has to do with the risk and impact of your work.

Medical doctors, engineers, lawyers, researcher, teachers - they all do important things and need training, selection and accountability.

Luckily, developers never have to write MCAS software for Boeing, so we can hang out on HN where you can be a Senior Engineer after a 6 months bootcamp and 2 years of stack overflow.

[oliwarner]

Data safety isn't nothing though. Developers should have some appreciation for security vectors, laws around its collection, storage and processing, and knowing when (and how) to delete it. Accessibility. Deployment. What happens when it all goes wrong. Far from an exhaustive list but you can see what I mean.

I don't think anybody is arguing about what people do for themselves, but advertising yourself as a developer when you might have no experience or training, misleads people. Gives the rest of us a bad name.

This is real a problem for freelance developers. In the 15 years or so I've been doing it, I've heard at least 30 stories of how "the last guy" critically underdelivered, and there's basically an expectation I'm going to run off with their cash. I relieve them of this pretty rapidly but it's a very defensive process.

[throwaway38235]

You are really missing the point and my sarcasm here...