In medical professions, you go through a period of training (clinicals, internship, residency) where people with tons of experience point out that you never learned anything. This humbling experience is not really available in the CS world.

Particularly disturbing, since the only good way I know of to learn programming and system architecture is through mentoring. Basically, our mentoring system is haphazard. There's even a lot of anti-mentoring happening out there.

I find this incredibly hard to believe. Anyone who has gone through a single intro course in CS should understand at least the difference between linear and quadratic time. Perhaps I've been in the university too long. Are these people non technical majors who picked up programming in PHP?

We have de facto certification. It's called moving to silicon valley :)

And everywhere else, people have to put up with crappy programming? I think this system leaves a bit to be desired.