The nature of programming is that any consensus solution can be automated. That's a good thing.

It's not that there's no professional culture in programming, it's that programming has a problem/solution space orders of magnitude larger than any other profession that has ever existed. If we could agree on some constraints of what software does and what the priorities are then we could develop more concrete professional standards, but that's not how it works. Software is the stuff of pure thought; it is layer upon layer of abstraction that towers up to henceforth unknown data processing tasks. As messy as it is, we can only strive to further the state of the art as it applies to the task at hand. There's no way to definitively pit NASA's process against Facebook's against a random perl data cruncher. None of this means programming doesn't have a professional culture, just that it will take a while longer to distill the strongest knowledge and it will necessarily be a broader than the other professional standards.

There's stuff to rely on, it's just that mostly nobody wants to spend the time reading it.

> There is almost nothing to rely on.

You could rely on your experience.

If you can't draw upon your past mistakes, or techniques that have failed for you before, you shouldn't be mentoring.

Put more positively, use your experience to guide others.

I would have thought www.swebok.org (Software Engineering Body of Knowledge) represents some consensus on what is good in programming?