I'd love it if everyone could program, it'd make my life a lot easier and I could do something else interesting.
Also if your job is easy enough to be done by a schoolchild after minimal training, I'm not sure you deserve it.
Worse yet, controlling information to secure your position is a special kind of evil. Do you respect lawyers who make the world more litigative and themselves more valuable? Do you respect doctors/police officers/etc that protect others in their profession at the expense of the people they hurt? That's the world one builds when they hide that kind of information, one where professions aren't equally accountable.
"Also if your job is easy enough to be done by a schoolchild after minimal training, I'm not sure you deserve it."
The question is not whether the job can done by a schoolchild with minimal training. The question is: Does your boss think that it can be done by a schoolchild with minimal training?
I don't have a solution. I don't want to see a license for programming or anything ridiculous---(although perhaps a license to manage programmers...), but there is a real problem here.