I started my programming career teaching myself to script and code to write tools to automate large aspect of my electrical engineering job. Eventually I hit the point, where my tools were getting huge and complicated and I realized that my professional software skills were lacking and I couldn't just keep producing this untested spaghetti code and hope to actually get things done in manageable way.

I then left for the world of professional software engineering, and in the time since, I've seen two companies that actually build software properly, and three companies producing worse code with worse practices than my self taught code from years ago.

Quite frankly the world of software development is downright embarassing to work in at times. I don't think we necessarily need to gatekeep software development with engineering degrees, but I do think that all developers should be required to take engineering ethics courses to understand their own responsibilities to push back and say no, this is not done and shippable until it's properly built and documented.