I've been wondering lately if the time might be right for the re-emergence of "guilds" i.e. organizations that promote the mastering of a craft. Not really "unions" in that the primary motivation would be teaching and improving, not bargaining with employers (though I realize that many modern unions do both).
A software engineering "guild" would seem to me to be a way to offer structured mentorship and certification of mastery without the need to also pay for years of busywork in humanities courses that, let's face it, are never applied by the vast majority of people working in our field.
a 'programmers guild' would be awesome. imagine learning to code at 14 instead of going to some worthless high school. you would start as an apprentice, watching an experienced programmer write code, helping fix syntax errors and spelling mistakes, while learning through osmosis. as a journeyman, you'd write simple unit tests, then more advanced functional tests, and then graduate by releasing your first app into production. by age 18 you could have four years of real world coding experience, while having earned a salary (albeit a small one) from age 14.
That's how it works with many opensource projects. You get around, contribute with docfixes, learn a little, then send a patch here and there, and sooner than you realize you can be doing contract or employed work related to the tools being used by the project, or to the project itself. IMHO, there's no shortage of well-paid work for those known to be talented by their peers.
A software engineering "guild" would seem to me to be a way to offer structured mentorship and certification of mastery without the need to also pay for years of busywork in humanities courses that, let's face it, are never applied by the vast majority of people working in our field.