At some level of abstraction all jobs can be made to look similar. It's just not particularly useful to abstract to that degree.

I think if you look in the communities formed by any groups of people sharing professions, you'll find a similar magnification of the importance and uniqueness of that profession: humans generally have a tendency to find the stuff they spend the most time around more significant, and often forget that the significance-difference is in perception only.

That said, because of software's generality (in terms of the number of domains it's applicable to), it is relatively unique.