[wanorris]

Sort of. Programming is justifiably considered a profession, like engineering, medicine, and the law -- as distinguished from other careers like sales and customer support. The distinction is a large body of background knowledge and skills that have to be acquired as a baseline for doing a job.

In a profession, learning things like clients' preferences can be vital to performing a job effectively, but it's overly reductionist to call them "the real skills", even if that might be true in, say, a sales position.