Of course your extra wage goes straight into maintaining that status with uncomfortable clothes, overpriced cars, a big house in the suburbs to support your trophy family who you then spend hours of unpaid overtime avoiding...

I mean you do you, but any job is going to involve a certain amount of doing stuff; personally I find CS algorithm puzzles a lot more fun than status games.

Status games? Hours of unpaid overtime? What are you talking about? The engineering managers (below the "C suite") everywhere I've worked have more or less kept the same hours as I have, dressed to the same standard, and used the same commute options as anyone else.

When you say things like "treated like a monkey expected to do tricks on demand", you're playing status games.

Ah, I see. You don't believe you're playing what you call a status game, even when you are.

The perspective that it's all a status game is legitimate in its own way, but not the only way to view things. I find there's a useful distinction to draw betwen trying to influence people's perceptions directly versus trying to do something valuable and trusting people to perceive it for themselves, and find the latter a lot more fun than the former.

See, the thing is that you keep calling it a "status game" when it's not really clear what you mean, other than to belittle work others do because it isn't solving algo puzzles.