I guess as a technical community, there are at least two forces at work here: 1) The community wants to be as inclusive as possible - get as many people to code as possible, because it is good for everyone to be able to contribute, even if it is using a higher-level tool/abstraction that does much of what we would do writing code by hand manually; and/or 2) The community wants to distinguish itself clearly based on skill-level at some level of core competency or abstraction.
I know we have plenty of professional certifications, but I don't know of one as general as this which exists yet and has any true merit. I think the IEEE was working on something like this.
To me what it feels like you're saying is - when you are truly an "expert", it is more likely that you can identify/recognize other "experts" - or even people with that potential.
When I look at my own skills, I try to rate myself honestly on the following scale with regards to some particular skill: expert, professional or amateur.
Expert is a guru-level understanding. If I say that I am an expert, I am saying I think I am as good as the top x% (where x is maybe 1-10) in a particular skill. For me, I pretty much never rate myself as this in any skill!
Professional is practiced, practical, hands-on real world skill. You've honed this skill, you've been formally trained, you've employed this skill successfully in a repeated, demonstrated way.
Amateur is a hobby, done it a few times, do it for fun or would like to do it/get better at it level of experience.
I observed that in traditional skilled tradesmanship, we have the apprentice, who progresses to the journeyman, who progresses to the master craftsman. These are the same levels of what I mean by amateur, professional and expert.
I don't know why our industry seems to reject some of these concepts from skilled trades in terms of organizing into better/stronger professional trade organizations and certifications.
Actually, the way we often talk about coding as a "craft", it's almost like we would feel a lot better with a formal organization and such a career progression/structure in place.
We have our 1%'ers in the software community, our gurus/experts/master craftsman. I often think of these as the core contributing past and current "fathers" and "mothers" of our industry, people ranging anywhere from Ada Lovelace to Vint Cerf. Reality is, those core thinkers are probably where many of us learn from anyway - that and "hacking/tinkering" which is what many of us do and can still lead to progress too.
To me it's all connected, but something about our community always holds us back... maybe there it is the element of not wanting to be forced into structure either. After all, the "hacker" ethos is also a source of our strength, and part of the art.
And as someone said its more about who you know not what you know.
You have to send the message, and be clear about it.
Developers have responsibilities. Serious obligations that can cause harm when not met properly.
You don't want to hire someone, and plunge them into the deep end, get them into a situation where they're in over their heads, and then have it end in tears, because you were uncomfortable about hurting someone's feelings up front.
Sending the message might help dissuade some people from misrepresenting, but those who choose to misrepresent may likely do so regardless.
Like a former salesperson at a startup with a few months of fumbling around with jquery documentation who calls himself an "engineer."
Still, let's find a solution as a community. How do we make it easier for people to enter the profession and leave the barrier for entry low while also making it easier for those in the profession to prove their skill-level and commitment to a specific track of the craft?
1) A public list of recognized job titles (think of an employment bureau catalog or else) that defines the job description by an authority. At least a reference that most would pay attention to.
2) A unified training program for each branch (or developers in question) outlining the required skills or targets for developers
3) A WordPress.org profile that showcases the work in a better manner - think of a GitHub/LinkedIn version in the WordPress context
I also wouldn't necessarily vouch for a licensing program (probably commercial/financial interests), but some standardization and guidelines could help immensely and solve various problems for employers, clients, expert and beginner developers, site builders, even users.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ocnliT7iHtI
You can also script photoshop, so if you are actually "developing" for photoshop then I would say yes although that would be certainly an unconventional way to join the trade.
If they could actually do this, yes it would. But they can't actually build something that a developer would build with code. If someone can't code at all, they can use WordPress to build a very small subset of what a developer can build with code.
A person who spend 30 seconds setting up a blog on tumblr is able to build something that a developer would build with code, but again it's just a small subset.
Now if that subset is all you need then it's fine to hire WordPress admin instead of a developer. But the term "developer" has a current meaning, and that meaning is analogous to "programmer".
That being said, language changes, and developer could become another meaningless job title like engineer (in some countries), and people will have to use another term for someone who can code.
There are ways to prevent this, in some jurisdictions they limit the use of titles like Engineer.
Not too long ago, an off the shelf solution didn't exist for anything, so you had to hire someone to build it from scratch.
By that definition, almost anyone should be called a "developer".
20 years ago, you needed to be a developer to set up a small homepage. Now my grandma can do that with Facebook, but I'm not going to call her a "developer" just because she's doing something that used to require one.