I feel like I can only dream about such a time, such a place. Engineer? Prestige?

Eh, don't know about the place. You'd be respected, but stuck with working for a shitty government and shitty people with their own agendas for all of your life.

That doesn't sound unique to the USSR lol

I guess so, but at least you'd have the choice to leave :-)

Well, I think, being a software engineer is still pretty cool in Silicon Valley :)

I think it's the inverse. Disregard for engineers seems like an anglo-saxon phenomenon to me. The Germanic countries are, of course, famed for holding engineers in high regard, but so do most third-world countries, and China.

I think the anglo-saxon opinion of engineers is caused by blurring the line between engineer and technician.

I think its caused by the inappropriate elevation of the marketing classes, who don't have a job unless someone else does the work of building something...

Not in the late 1980s certainly.