As perceived by the general public, there is a huge difference: Most people have some idea, however vague, what a doctor or a lawyer actually does, while 'programming a computer' is utterly obscure and opaque to a lot of those same people.

This keeps surprising me again and again, but apparently any kind of computing device is a black box built on magic, probably to the vast majority out there.

Very true. When I'm at social occasions and I get asked what I do for a living, the subject will be hurriedly dropped when I reply that I'm a software developer. It amuses me. As you say, the whole concept seems to be so far outside of most people's frame of reference, that they have literally nothing to say on the subject.

The lack of intellectual curiosity in the general populace is dismaying to me, but it was ever thus.

> the whole concept seems to be so far outside of most people's frame of reference

What? Are you living in the same world as me?

Pretty much every industry apart from manual labour or craftsmanship related work uses software. If you work in an office chances you spend most of your time using software.

Then people go home and play on their smartphones which connect to back-end API servers developed by software engineers or stream films of netflix, also developed by software engineers.

You completely missed my point. I wasn't suggesting that the average person doesn't utilise software on a day to day basis. I was agreeing with the author of the post above mine, who pointed out that to most people, "any kind of computing device is a black box built on magic". They have absolutely no idea how their devices work, and neither do they care to find out.

The author of the post above yours absolutely concur. Everybody uses software. Few have even a basic conception of how it works.

Not sure if that's true. Legal minutiae and latin diseases are at least as opaque to people as software code, the actual work likely less glamorous than programming.

Yeah I don't really see law or medicine as any different in this regard.

People all have a basic idea of what makes you ill, what various diseases, treatments etc. are. But most people don't understand the intricacies of the endocrine system.

People all have a basic understanding of the law, what kind of sentences to expect for what crimes, how court works etc. But most people don't understand <INSERT_COMPLICATED_ASPECT_OF_LAW>.

You see where I am going with this..

People all have a basic idea of how the internet works (you connect to the network and data is returned to your computer), the difference between 4G and Wi-fi etc. But most people won't be able to explain the difference between RSA cryptogrpahy and eliptic curve cryptography.

My original point (which you don't seem to disagree with): It's on Hollywood to fix the misrepresentation of IT workers asap and produce some heroic characters from our field.

There are people who quite like this outsider role.

Concerning the "Hollywood argument": if I think how Hollywood demands DRM in evermore standards and to infect your life, not being liked by Hollywood is one of the best advertisements for programming jobs that exist.

Conjecture here, and a pretty simple one: people like money, power, and status. Lawyers and doctors have tons of money, have power over you (you are alive, you are not in jail, all because of them), and have credentials because they need to pass hard tests. That's easy to like.

By contrast, understanding what some computer people even do is hard for the layman (no obvious power), and until pretty recently computers did not make you a lot of money. We also let pretty much any idiot with a computer write code, it is not a position of status.

Shows like Mr. Robot and Silicon Valley are already starting to show how perception is changing. Nerds still get made fun of, but you can't be laughing too much at filthy rich entrepreneurs or hackers who do whatever they want to drug dealers, the police, etc.