Doctors and lawyers are in a position where folks need to go to them to obtain indispensable services that only they are legally entitled to provide. As coders we're part of the working class like everyone else. Maybe with some bonus perks like free food. Everyday people aren't required to respect us, because we don't have any real power over their lives. We just show up to our jobs in a distant office and build stuff to make life better for people in general.
It’s probably a simple answer: nobody regulates or gatekeeps the title of Software Engineer, so any yahoo can (and does) claim to be one, with highly variable results.
The other factor is that it’s certainly possible to be a first class software engineer while still a teenager, whereas I suspect there are no teenage doctors. So you have a population of very young, very capable engineers, who have fast-forwarded their careers past all the hard-won social skills lessons that others their age have been learning.
Re:Ask HN: Are you ok?
by tomatotomato37 on Thursday September 12, 2019 @01:51PM
(#20954296)
I always thought doctors were a special case as literally saving people from death on a regular basis lends itself to a bit of a god complex
The collapse of American education might have something to do with this.
Australian here; it's the same here. "Oh Software Engineer..." cue vacant look
Yep, it's a bit frustrating. I often talk to people in careers I know nothing about, so I ask questions. Then you have a conversation going. Sometimes it feels like people are afraid to be curious about software engineering, lest they get infected with nerdiness.
I find the same preemptive assumption from many people that they are incapable of understanding mathematics. The usual statement is: "I'm not a math person." This alone tells me how criminally warped their view on academics and mathematics must have been shaped, and how rotten we are at teaching concepts in a way multiple subsets of the classroom can learn at once.
Oddly enough, I recently found myself saying something to this effect, in a meeting: "I'm an engineer, a professional. I like to take pride in my work. I look at doctors (or civil engineers) at my age and wonder about the level of respect they enjoy and how they approach their profession. How did we get to a point where we (generalizing here) got to a point where we both behave, and are treated as borderline-savants who must be tolerated out of sheer necessity?"