Anybody who's done hiring will attest that "formal barriers to entry" (i.e. accreditation via certifications and degrees) say very little about a programmer's ability to produce valuable output. Hiring would not be "the big problem" in tech if one could simply outsource the hiring decision to such a formal barrier to entry. But, since formal barriers to entry are demonstrably useless signals specifically for hiring programmers, we resort to all sorts of other superstitions which, when put together, at least bestow a visceral sense of being able to divine a person's ability to produce valuable output. People and companies all seem to have their own preferred superstitions, almost none of which include your "formal barriers to entry".