If someone wants to hire someone who can kinda program a little, because they charge less, and are likely able to accomplish the task the person has in mind, then they should be free to do that.
(Of course, if the task is one where failure causes a big problem, then one should get someone more qualified.)
The vast majority of developers cannot kill you if they screw up. In the cases where that isn't true, e.g. software for medical equipment, I'd expect to find some significantly higher hurdles to get past before you can release that software.
We don't generally require developers to have certain qualifications, but their output can be measured in other standardised ways nonetheless.
What are these standardised ways to measure developer output? I've never seen any, beyond "burndown charts" and "LOC", which I don't believe pass the sniff test.
Low affordance causes spilled blood, blood causes regulations.
Yet, these are highly paid jobs because It’s not about being able to do it, it’s about understanding what they are doing. This way, they don’t just know how to do it but why to do it and what are the implications of doings it and how to debug it when the outcome is not the expected one.
Any junior can probably do %99 of what their seniors can do, yet when you look for a highly paid senior you don’t take a cheap junior as an option.
US health system might be a racket but not the health profession. No where else visiting a hospital is a financial decision(yet the med staff is still well paid), you only worry about the medical issue and it’s impact on your life and the lives of your loved ones, except maybe when you need some very novel treatment for your rare condition.
I have to add that this way of thinking, in general, is a very blue collar mental model on how world works. Nurses claim that they can do what doctors do, mechanics claim that they can do what engineers do all the time.