cs-holder

Interesting. Manual laborer or "blue-collar" in the US is almost like a separate "tree" than professional or "white-collar" jobs. If you actually have a skilled or semi-skilled blue-collar job that hasn't been displaced by immigration or automation you are doing pretty well compared to those in the bottom part of the "white-collar" tree. Also the majority of your friends and family would probably be blue-collar and you wouldn't even be comparing yourself to doctors and lawyers.

I've heard that "actual" engineers, like people who design plants, vehicles, bridges, buildings, etc. are considered higher status in Europe than in the US. Here I think probably the top 20-30% of software developers are better regarded (and make way more money) than most of these engineers, unless these engineers are on their way to upper management or determining investments. I also think whether you're one of those people -- your social class, basically -- is pretty much determined by the day you turn 18, even in the US.

By lawyer I meant either hired at big law or running a profitable practice, by doctor I meant made it into residency. This is only one, narrow dimension of "high-status", but still. Newspapers get things wrong all the time.

Since when is being a software engineer a "high-status" job, as mentioned in the first paragraph? Most people would consider a non-washed out doctor or lawyer (which is expensive and difficult to achieve) as having higher status than pretty much anyone working with a CS degree, unless they are a successful founder or went into investments. Besides medicine/law, young people with some degree of privilege and ambition seem to go into banking, private equity or management consulting still. If they have a CS degree, they're doing something closer to the above with it, not being ads CRUD engineer #3445. Everyone working for a for-profit company as a software engineer and even founders and VCs are basically dancing to the tune of one of these people holding the purse-strings. Is this wrong or do I just have a chip on my shoulder about this?

It might make some of the people here who are worrying about competition for their jobs feel better to know that a good portion of CS graduates couldn't code their way out of a paper sack[1]. I have a CS bachelor's from what is considered a very good school and let me tell you, I frequently worked on group projects with complete sloppy bozos who had no idea what they were doing and still graduated. I can't imagine the standards have gone up with the recent flood of students and pressure to improve graduation rates.

[1]I know, I know, CS is not about "coding". But trust me, these people were not making up for it with advanced theoretical work or even like, HCI.