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?
> Besides medicine/law, young people with some degree of privilege and ambition seem to go into banking, private equity or management consulting still.
The number of MIT/Stanford/Harvard kids running around the valley should disprove that point. As someone who attended a Goldman/McKinsey farm school, many of the prestige chasers who would in another era have gone to a bulge bracket are going to work for a FAANG or a unicorn instead because they do see tech as an appropriate substitute for a more traditional high prestige career.
If by lawyer you mean partner and by doctor you mean a practicing surgeon, both of those are pretty far into their careers. It's not very fair to compare them with an entry level engineering job.
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.
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.
