Don’t worry, it’ll happen.

All that’s needed is one major, 9/11-class loss of life in an American city involving at least one national politician’s and/or media celebrity’s family member that can be laid undeniably at the feet of defective software. “If it bleeds, it leads” media will whip up people until there’s irresistible political pressure to Do Something to Keep This From Happening Again. That’s how professional engineering got started in the US to begin with, after the New London School explosion.

Will that process deliver effective, useful standards? Almost certainly not, at least for the first several years (and/or further disasters). Will that process take into account the knowledge and experience of us practitioners who’ve been shouting in the bromantic wilderness for decades trying to help change happen? Your chances are much better with the lottery, especially if you buy a ticket. Will that process leave a profession open to all who qualify, or is the buddy/clique system presently in place going to prevail? Need you ask?

The only way to have a system that works for the public good, and for newly-recognised professionals, is for us to organise and build it ourselves. In North America and South Asia, that has been very effectively and systematically blocked by isolating individuals through the myth of the ‘hero programmer”. People are taught to go against their own interests by being told that the only way they can keep their job and/or their employability is to knuckle down. H1B is not and never was about a shortage of talent; it is and always was about a “shortage” of cheap, arbitrarily-disposable talent.

Developers of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your exploitation!