What the hell? How did you respond to that?

I guess there's a lot I could have said, but what I actually said was "oh", and left.

I'll admit, I was hoping for a heroic story of how that person was made aware of their mistake and begged for forgiveness :D

and that's why we are a low status profession...

Instead of digging your heels, and telling her your speech will be much more beneficial to both the students and the company, you did the typical nerdy thing and avoided confrontation and just left

What kind of confrontation could that be? "Oh but come on! I am important!" or "But I have moderately high salary!"?

I think OP did the smart decision.

I would have started by asking what position she was looking for, and if she started all the way at the top like CEO, I’d whittle it down by starting with “don’t you think encouraging your entire class to aim only for the top, that you’ll be setting lots of them up for failure?” And if she didn’t relent, follow it up with “people who are on a CEO track need to know what life is like for those who build their products.” Or ask her whether she’s running a CS or MBA program for a cheeky jab.

You’ll never know if you don’t ask, and there are no stupid questions.

Its easy to come up with that after having thought it over for 30 seconds but on the spot, when what the person just told you comes as a shock, you're unlikely to muster up such a response.

Oh I have plenty of that too. But it's usually the case that saying _anything_ reasonable is enough of a foot in the door to a wider conversation. And it's a lot like creativity, or math, or music... the more you do it, the better you get at it.

It's like when you learn a new language, one of the first things you learn is how to say "I don't speak X well, please slow down" in that language. Same with debate: learn how to say "I'm trying to better understand" to prime the other person for a conversation. Sometimes they'll start talking for you–that's even a common negotiation tactic, to let the other person talk to basically give you a few points to think about questioning/rebutting, or look for contradictions.

That assumes plenty of time to think about what happened and formulate the best response. That's rarely possible in the roughly 1200 milliseconds available for a timely reply to a perceived insult.

I think I'd only be able to do that if I'd had the same conversation previously. Come to think of it, sounds like just about every tech interview I've ever had.

Do you still work there?

No, I left nearly 10 years ago, but it wasn't related to that incident.

Who were they looking for to speak? The C-Suite? If so, why even send emails to everyone in the first place?

A colleague of mine referred to software engineering as a stepping stone for her. She never saw it as something she would do until retirement.

It took years until I came around to the same realization for myself. It's significantly harder to coordinate and architect "layer 8" bullshit than it is to write apps or lay networks. And there's infinite layers of complexity in it as well.

You don't hear a whole lot of people in management claiming it's fun like you do in software engineering. That is probably a clue. Well, it was for me anyways.

Wish I had more than one upvote. This is a great story, one I wish more people would read who value "prestige" and "importance" in their careers. Being L9 Super Senior Software Engineer does not really give you any more credibility or prestige among the general public than you had as Entry Level Code Monkey. Nobody is going to ask you to so much as speak at a high school graduation or Rotary Club meeting just because you solely did the high level architecture for your company's suite of accounting apps.