>>>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.

There are lots of anecdotes like that in this business. That's what makes defining a so-called "professional" difficult.

I find it annoying when people use the term as a bludgeon e.g. person A writes code one way, person B thinks it's better to do it a different way and calls person A "unprofessional". On a public forum like this it's tantamount to defamation. Most, if not all regulated professions have strict rules about criticizing fellow professionals.