To be fair, as someone with a fair number of doctor friends, the other side of the equation is equally important.<p>In the US, we have a fair number of &quot;must be this well educated in the field to work&quot; legal requirements in these fields. In terms of, if someone walked in off the street, tried to X, and screwed it up, then there would be fairly serious consequences of the screw up.<p>We expect excellence (or at least competency), which means education, which means substantial upfront monetary investment in oneself to prepare for profession X.<p>Certainly there&#x27;s a lot of archaic &amp; unmodernized baggage in these fields, but the basic bargain of &quot;if you put up your own money (or borrow) to successfully train yourself in these fields, then we will provide some stability on the demand side to bound your risk.&quot;<p>And before it gets tossed out, no, the amount of education to become a practicing software engineer in the US is <i>nothing</i> like any of the above fields in terms of financial risk and calendar time learning.