[josquindesprez]

In my experience, the 'heads down; just let me code and go home' attitude is beaten into a lot of engineers by a series of bad experiences with management. Experiences in which their input is repeatedly ignored in favor of what seems like management bullshit.

> if you want to be involved at the upper levels, nothing is stopping you. you just need to either find that job, or create one for yourself.

I'd imagine many engineers are coming at it from a slightly different perspective. They're used to being able to self-teach. They're used to REPLs, where getting instant feedback is easy. They're used to having the luxury of rapidly iterating on failure before they get it right. They're used to a world of technical decisions where being smart and right is often enough to win.

Trying the same process with management bites them in the ass, and disillusions them.

It sounds like you envy their freedom to put their head down as much as they envy your freedom to _matter_.

Ultimately, you're not totally wrong, but complaining about the symptoms without treating the cause isn't productive.

[sidlls]

In my experience the "heads down; just let me code and go home" mentality is more frequently one part of a general ambivalence or even hostility about things that aren't engineering (or, worse, specifically CS).

[aje403]

I understand that may feel that way, but I think that perspective is complete shit for someone to have. Nothing is beaten into anyone. That is a losing attitude in life. Every profession on the planet can involve idiot managers expecting subservience - software is only a slight exception because it involves people with weaker social skills (sorry, yeah) and higher creativity. If you don't like your job, nothing is keeping you there. If you're 35, you have a decent salary, and you have a family or some other thing locking you in, your own life decisions brought you to that point. Any engineer can come up with an idea, make friends, start a company, leave the software world and start a coffee shop, work hard to find a different position with upward mobility. That's easier said than done, but life is not easy and it's full of choices.