There is being a "professional programmer" who mostly builds large systems that put other people's expertise to work.
Even before the microcomputer revolution, back in the dawn of timesharing, there have also been "non-professional programmers" who write software to put wheels on their scientific, engineering, business, literary, accounting, medical, mathematical, artistic or whatever skills they have.
To be a professional programmer you're really going to have to learn how to whip other people's bad conceptual models into shape, track down difficult bugs, not use an O(N^2) algorithm when an O(N) algorithm is available and N is large, understand the difference between C++ compilers and whatever details turn up to be relevant in a particular case. (e.g. You're never going to know all of these things but you have to find out the ones that are relevant to your project!)
The non-professional programmer is going to be more focused on the problem domain even though they still sometimes might need to figure out something technically hard to make their system work.
Even before the microcomputer revolution, back in the dawn of timesharing, there have also been "non-professional programmers" who write software to put wheels on their scientific, engineering, business, literary, accounting, medical, mathematical, artistic or whatever skills they have.
To be a professional programmer you're really going to have to learn how to whip other people's bad conceptual models into shape, track down difficult bugs, not use an O(N^2) algorithm when an O(N) algorithm is available and N is large, understand the difference between C++ compilers and whatever details turn up to be relevant in a particular case. (e.g. You're never going to know all of these things but you have to find out the ones that are relevant to your project!)
The non-professional programmer is going to be more focused on the problem domain even though they still sometimes might need to figure out something technically hard to make their system work.