The Low Status of Software Engineers

Michael O. Church’s intriguing article exploring the low status of software engineers to upper management.

How the Other Half Works: an Adventure in the Low Status of Software Engineers.

A few fun tidbits:

… for a point that I’ll come back to, software engineers lack the social status necessary to make others invest in them.

And…

For a software engineer, “relocation” is usually some shitty $3,000 lump-sum package, because “software engineer”, to executives, means “22-year-old clueless male with few possessions, and with free storage of the parental category”. On the other hand, if you’re a manager, you might be seen as a real human being with actual concerns about relocating to another part of the country.

And…

What most of us don’t realize is that this culture of mandatory “passion” lowers our social status, because it encourages us to work unreasonably hard and irrespective of conditions. The fastest way to lose social status is to show acceptance of low social status.

Finally…

If programmers want to be taken seriously, and we should be taken seriously and we certainly should want this, we’re going to have to take stock of our compromised position and fix it, even if that’s “getting political”. We’re going to have to stop glorifying pointless self-sacrifice for what is ultimately someone else’s business transaction, and start asserting ourselves and our values.

Go read it yourself. Please. You deserve it.