Do Software Engineers Get Enough Respect?

(Edit: On first read, I didn't know what the PE was. I thought you were just talking about the typical tech-company interview process.)

Difficult interviews (which many focused on, more than I did in the original article) aren't the problem. In fact, I think that difficult interviews are generally a good thing. My problem is that passing the difficult interview doesn't necessarily confer respect.

If I have to spend a whole day at a whiteboard proving my intelligence, fine. I'm confident that I'll pass. If after proving myself, I'm still offered 0.05% (at 50 people) and no relocation package, then I'm going to be pissed. I've already proved myself qualified for a real job with a real package, so either come up with one, or don't waste my time in the first place.

Challenging interviews are a good thing. Challenging interviews with no upside (i.e. even if you're smart, you still get the default shitty/take-advantage-of-clueless-people-in-their-20s engineer offer) are a total waste of time.

I would suggest that software programmers do not adopt that mode of thought unless they want to be disrespected by business people. Even with the author's qualification of "micro-" as in micro-business decisions, it still does not make the statement respectable.

I say this as a someone who's been on the business side and the hardcore software programming side. I think other engineering-entrepreneurs sympathetic towards programmers would also be dismissive of such proclamations trying to glamorize "VARCHAR(30) vs VARCHAR(40)" as a "business decision".

If software programmers want to be viewed as key business people, they have to make real business decisions and not dress up or redefine programming thoughts as "business decisions".

Job fraud is claiming you can do something that you're objectively unqualified to do, usually by counterfeiting formal certifications. For example, if you claim to be a doctor but never went to medical school, you're guilty of job fraud and should go to jail.

Social status inflation is something that everyone does, and that everything has been doing for hundreds of thousands of years. It's ethically OK. Don't get caught, because high-status people tend to be protectionist over their pedigree, but there's nothing morally wrong with it. Generally it's best not to put inflations in written form, for practical reasons. The answer to "Should I lie on my CV?" is almost always "no". Write a truthful CV and keep the inflations in verbal form as much as you can.

In truth, moving one's title to the management track is a demotion in a way, because it's so much harder to make "X-equivalent engineer" than X on the management track. Take Google. It's ridiculously easy to make the Director level on the management track. The main requirement is a pulse. It's extremely hard to make Principal or Distinguished Engineer.

Middle management (MacLeod Clueless) used to be the bilge pump system of the company. It cleaned up messes made above by self-dealing executives (MacLeod Sociopaths) and from below by checked-out subordinates (MacLeod Losers). Now, that function is being pushed increasingly to tech. We're what self-dealing HR thugs and narcissistic executives externalize their costs into.

The theatrics are things like talking about whatever language is hot (doesn't matter), whatever language is fastest (doesn't matter until later), how important it is to learn to code (it isn't, except it really is), how important it is to get subpopulation X into the industry (I'll explain more in a second on that), how "not scary" things that look "scary" are, and so forth.

In some ways, I feel that we put so much an emphasis on learning to code and making it accessible that we forget that it is a skill that is ultimately vocational and practical--it's not snowflake work, it's done to solve a problem. I fear that in our eagerness to make things more accessible we're yet again making our field out to be somehow special enough to warrant that different treatment.

I'd much prefer that we treat it as "this is how you solve a problem", or "here's a cool thing we can do", or anything that's just more understated and chill than how we seem to go about it.

A special note about the "making it more attractive to subpopulation X":

(I'm going to choose X = ciswomen, because that's what I've got the most experience with)

Friend went to Chile and while there helped out at an "introduce women to computing" event, of the same sort he and I volunteer at here stateside. He reported (as memory serves) that the attitude there of the women was "Oh, okay, new thingy, cool!", whereas at our events here it's usually "Oh, computers/programming isn't really a girl thing, so we're trying something foreign and maybe a little uncomfortable but fun".

I've even seen--much to my chagrin!--women helpfully setting double-standards that serve to undermine their peers when new to the field. At one of our recurring events, somebody who had some experience (hard-won, former non-tech background, got in by way of blogging and SEO, now doing Python) was trying to explain to one of her neighbors that "Oh, well, if you're a girl, you probably haven't seen this before, right angersock?". I was quite flummoxed. The problem there was that she was giving her peers the mental out of "Oh, another woman had problems with this--so, it's okay if I have problems with it...it's not expected of us anyways". It's incredibly subtle and incredibly toxic.

By contrast, in Chile, my friend found that because the computers and internet and whatnot were (relatively) so new in their spread, everybody was considered a novice, and so there were a lot fewer gender boundaries inhibiting learning and exploration.

I am saddened everytime we present tech as something being new or novel or "something to be made easy" because I believe that in doing so we perpetuate the idea that programming has to be hard or that it is some sort of optional skill. Ideally, it should be something like riding a bike or sex--you know how to do it, everybody kind of knows how to do it, and maybe you end up doing it every day with people you enjoy the company of.