The lack of centralized control is a good thing. In other industries you can be barred from even working in the field if the "council" doesn't like you.
Things like the lawyers' bar are complete bullshit as a concept in themselves.
That attitude is exactly why we have quality and fad problems. ::shrug::
Besides, isn't the argument here that a guild would enforce more conformity upon professional programmers? Linux wasn't made by professionals, in the beginning; it was made by a college student who then collaborated with other academics. A guild can't prevent that, any more than it can prevent people from buying copper pipe and fittings from Home Depot and fixing their own plumbing. And further, how long did it take before companies really started taking Linux seriously? It was ages before free and open-source software finally got (mostly) past the attitudes that hindered its adoption in corporations. I don't see how a guild would have changed this at all.
Since at this point the marginal benefit to the populace for each additional lawyer is negative, I'm glad the Bar has done even the little it has to limit the number of lawyers. I certainly wouldn't want to see an even less regulated market in lawyer service... eventually when most coders are coding pay2win games we'll have some regulations imposed from outside.
Associations and certifications don't necessarily have to involve the government. Various professions in various countries have non-government certifications that are well regarded (one such example would be a Bachelors Degree).
Unless you are making the arguing that libertarians are opposed to certification in general, whether the state is involved or not. In which case you've completely lost me.
- A Bachelor's degree is well regarded, but it is not sufficient to demonstrate competence. A working certification system demonstrates competence on the part of the certification-holder.
The problem with having no government involved in these things is that inevitably someone is going to ask a software engineer to do something that's "Legal But Unethical", and the question at hand winds up being: can the person be fired for this(remember, this is the engineer's career and livelihood)? And here we find the Law being involved. Or we find that building really bad software impacts people's quality of life in measurable ways, but the market won't improve the software. Infrastructurally, this requires a coordinated effort.
This specifically is why unions and the law's intruding are so entangled: companies can be extraordinarily abusive to their employees; they can also be abusive to their customers (monopolies are distrusted for this very reason). And the proper recourses here involve significant fines and/or jail time - meaningful mechanisms of discouraging misbehavior.
Degrees are an absolutely awful example of a non-government certification. They're given out by institutions that are almost universally state founded, run and regulated. The US probably has the most private universities as a proportion of universities of any nation and I doubt they break 30%.
It's crab bucket is what it is.
Tell them they're smart, they're critical! and then work them to the bone until you can replace them with the next batch of the bright-eyed and bushy tailed.