Programming is one of the few fields left where measures of productivity, utility, and value have not yet been fully usurped by the more arbitrary measures of popularity and seniority. You can judge a programmer by the quality and quantity of the product he/she produces, so you don't need to do it by arbitrary social rank.

In other professions where an individual's marginal product of labor is much more difficult to measure or is averaged together with that of everyone else in the organization, ranking people based on these extraneous social factors becomes necessary, but with programmers it is unnecessary and even harmful because the incentive structure becomes biased toward factors other than programming productivity.