[vonmoltke]

Considering your setup, on what side do you think most software engineers would fall? The elites who have "made it" at Google and Facebook might be fine, but those factories employ tens of thousands of software engineers and programmers in addition to tens of thousands of skilled manufacturing workers. They both lose their jobs when those factories close.

Engineering (all engineering, not just software engineering) is somewhere between a trade and a profession; too skilled and intellectually rigorous for the former but lacking the status of the latter.

[TheCoelacanth]

In the middle. Perhaps one might even call it the "middle class".

[emodendroket]

I'd say they fall pretty squarely into the professional-managerial class