Indeed. If it was illegal to work as a programmer without a Master’s degree in Computer Science with a GPA above 3.0 the interview process would not look like the current one.

The industry wouldn't look the same, either: it wouldn't be nearly as profitable or widespread as it has become, and nobody but CS academics would care about it.

And it would be much better, we would stop having pseudo-"engineers".

Quite, we should also eliminate nurses. The minimum qualification to work in healthcare should be a medical degree, just like we shouldn’t allow any car that’s worse in an accident than a Tesla on the road.

Most European countries require a 4 year degree for nurses, where the first two years are kind of shared with medical degree.

Kind of shared?

Nursing

https://www.ucc.ie/en/ck710/

Medicine

https://www.ucc.ie/en/ck701/

There is not one single shared course between the two degrees. If you can find a course shared between medical and nursing students in all of Europe I'd be surprised.

Portugal, Spain and Greece as the examples I know.

Nursing is taught at many universities with medical degree, first and second year students tend to share some of the lectures.

Also, because of that, people with nursing degree are able to acquire a medical degree by taking the extra lectures and exams afterwards.

Could you furnish me an example from Western Europe please then? I am familiar enough with the Romance languages to read Portuguese or Spanish if there’s a university with any/substantial overlap between nursing and medicine.

What usually happens is that nursery faculties sometimes share a few lectures with medicine faculties, for things like biochemistry, biophysics.

It is not examples that one finds online, rather on corridors and schedule notes.

What I can provide as an example is that nurses and doctors have equal access to many master and PhDs. Check "condições de acesso" in some of the links from the page and you will find "enfermagem" as accepted degree.

http://www.uc.pt/fmuc/gabineteestudoavancados/formacaoposgra...

AFAIK, most or all US schools have required a 4 year degree for a long time now.

On the other hand, perhaps the quality of code would go up?

I've been through an acquisition or two in my day (on the acquiring side). I'd echo knicholes' comment about that and go further: in my experience code quality and degree credential don't seem to have any relationship.

I've seen too many projects created by people with higher degrees to bet on that.

After personally seeing two large, recent acquisitions, I can attest that code quality != business value.

All you need to do is to enforce functional programming everywhere and only CS academics would stay ;-)

The industry is different, that is another issue. Programmers do not deal with just the small variations of the mostly the same code base (human body) which broke down (got ill) for some reason, but most bugs have pretty well documented symptoms and prescriptions how to fix them.