>>Are we not supposed to be professionals?
>
>http://it.slashdot.org/story/13/10/21/1652257/most-it-workers-dont-have-stem-science-tech-engineering-math-degrees

That's interesting, Al.
In fact, none of the best programmers that I've worked with had math, computer science, or other technical degrees.
By definition, the people who made the breakthroughs in this business could not have had much training since they were defining what the rest of us had to learn.
That was certainly true of the people who trained me.
The best programmer I ever hired was a 19 year old high school dropout auto mechanic who fooled around with an Atari and decided to change careers while taking some courses at night.
I spent some time in the motor pool in the service, so in the interview I asked him to tell me how he'd trace a short in a lighting system. His answer was right on the money.
I hired him and gave him a VFP manual and a couple of days training before starting him on small projects.
Then he took off on his own and in a few months became one of the best VFP programmers I've ever seen.
One of our clients paid us a nice fee in return for letting them hire him and he's now the lead programmer for one of the largest companies on Long Island.
I don't think he ever did get that degree, though.