Your comment addresses many things at once, some insightful, others more botched IMO. However I find them wrong in a very interesting way, so let me try to counter them.

First, seeing "programming" as a generalised activity is barely more accurate than bundling "doing stuff in front of a screen and keyboard" together. You wouldn't bundle together writing a novel and doing mechanical simulations on Mapple, would you? Same for programming. More specifically, the intersection between fun+unpaid open-source programming and corporate programming is tiny. Nobody's going to write an open-source SAP module for fun. As for big, strategic open-source projects, they have their many unfunny parts done by employees, who typically work for companies who want to commoditize something on their vertical market, by enabling an open-source product.

I do hack some stuff for fun, some others for money. I reasonably often manage to write fun stuff for money, and sometimes I even get to open-source it. But my open-source programming? I do that because it's more fun than _World of Warcraft_ or TV watching in my twisted mind; it has little to do with my job (most of the time, and unfortunately).

The "I'm no Senior Software Architect I'm just a coder" thing: OK I'm guilty of that one, but it's no modesty, it's just instinctive rejection towards a corporate system we often despise. We have a urge to reject the Dilbert ladder, the way you might reject a medal proposal from a country / organization whose ethics you condemn. Think of the people who declined the Nobel prize, nobody ever believe anyone did that out of modesty. An important point of yours still stands though: not playing along with the corporate charade is going to hurt most of those who indulge in it, in the long term.

About ageism, and as a not-so-young person anymore: when you age, you get a broader picture of what you work on, and why, while you lose some sharpness, most notably in speed of learning. This broader view has some value for the company, but only as long as it comes with some managerial skills: your better synthetic view is of no value, if you can't effectively share it with others. Your caricatural Aspergerish programmer doesn't have the interpersonal skills required to transform the insights of maturity into value for a company, and that kind of person is over-represented among the people who still call themselves "coders" when they hit 40. Successful mature hackers hide under other titles, in companies.

As for the "everyone can be a programmer", I don't remember having ever witnessed that, quite the opposite. Actually, I'm here because a decade ago, I enjoyed reading some smug essays, from some openly elitist guy who was trying to figure out what made hackers such special bunch ;-)

About the dangers of boot camps: if you need to teach someone how to program, he won't be serious competition for any hacker. You'd have to teach a hacker how _not_ to program. Cue that famous story about Mozart [http://betweenletters.quora.com/Mozart-How-Do-You-Write-a-Sy...]. OTOH, H1B might be more of an issue, I don't know. Sure it's cheaper competition; but what makes the Silicon Valley such a wealth generator is a critical mass of smart people. It might well be that allowing a thousand super-smart foreigners creates interesting jobs for hundreds of thousands of merely-smart Americans?

About programmers being typically unsavvy with politics and human relationships, there sure is a strong correlation here. Not being American, I don't understand why you typically despise unions more than the other lobbies which serve wealthier interests, but I can see the savviness in avoiding a name that triggers knee-jerk reactions in many voters.

So, back to the core argument: why don't we organize into unions, optionally under a less unamerican name? An issue is that many of the smarter programmers already have a fun job at a decent pay. In Europe, they also typically enjoy a healthy life/work balance, but the American relationship with "work ethics" is yet another thing I won't pretend to understand. Anyway, when you have fun doing something you're good at, you aren't tempted to enter a field you neither like nor master, such as politics, be it the genuine or the corporate kind.

And why aren't we typically good at it? Well, we typically enjoy deterministic things with explicit rules, like computers and unlike politics. We also typically can and love to fit complex models in our minds all at once, to design and debug them; I guess it often comes with a solipsist / introvert character.

Would I want a programmers' union? I'm not sure. I fear that it would favor a bureaucratized view of development, and suck the fun out of the job. I navigate the anarchic development job market just fine the current way, favoring what I personally care about (lots of from-scratch / exploratory developments, moderate workload, mutual trust with my hierarchy). I don't want to think of my job as a permanent struggle against my nasty overlords, the way automobile workers seem to experience their workday. But sure, there needs to be someone to kick the companies' asses when they implement no-poaching cartels.