I think it's an okay attitude to have early in your career. I don't think I would have gotten a foot-in-the-door where I am geographically if my price hadn't been so low. It's very hard to genuinely argue that you're worth $X when you have no professional history. The alternative is essentially socially engineering your way into a position to get the initial experience, and that can be rather underhanded. It's relative though, because even though I am underpaid compared to the USA national average, it's still higher than the median individual incomes for my state. Once I get a year or two under my belt, that experience very quickly pays me dividends by giving me skills and experience that can take me almost anywhere in the world for decent salaries. For the second job, I plan on negotiating much more aggressively. The critical error is maintaining this initial attitude AFTER you have the experience to back up the talk.

The advantage to this attitude is that it appeals to HR and Technical interviewers. You're an upstart with some introductory skills and you probably have the competency to learn on the job and become productive within a decent time frame. It's better than working retail or fast food.

If we move towards an environment more like doctors and lawyers, we'll lose some of the self-taught crowd and probably rely more on paper credentials. I'm sort of talking out of my ass at this point because I've never seen or heard a doctor/lawyer interview for a job, but I imagine it's a little more involved and cautious than our industry's technical tests, puzzles, and quizzes. Our education is also far less involved. Our industry doesn't seem to want to move towards more in-depth technical interviews to establish competency, so unless some heavy regulation comes down the pipe, I really doubt the industry will become professional like the industries of doctors and lawyers

(And besides, why would we? Not every position in the industry will require extensive skills and education. We don't need BAR examines or peer interviews or board examinations or state licenses to build websites)

Another facet of this is that doctors/lawyers are somewhat gated by the time and money costs of education. In 6 months you can crank out one unit of basic programmer through bootcamps or whatever for a fraction of the cost that it takes to produce one unit of doctor or lawyer.