[lsc]

>Totally agree that executives and so on are hyper-vigilant about status. However it's possible to be aware of status without aiming to increase it. Those whom I had in mind are religious leaders like Jesus or the Buddha. They apparently saw no difference between people in their essence.

I think "leaders" and "prophets" or "people who inspire" are very different animals. Leaders talk about inspiring, but... I really think leadership is about convincing, not about inspiring.

>Engineers work with objective reality and so they are humble at least with respect to knowledge. This will be evident from their behaviour in most cases but there will be some who are appear arrogant yet competent. I would conclude that they are humble in private.

many of our arguments have testable answers, yes, or to put it another way, our theories are usually more easily testable than those of management, but... status still plays into it, really in similar ways too, I think, management; You gain status as an engineer at least in part by being technically right; you gain status as a manager at least in part by convincing people of things. Do you see the similarity? People who are good at a job generally value other practitioners in how good they are at that job; it's engineering's job to be technically correct; it's management's job to convince people.