[mlthoughts2018]

It feels like you are making sweeping generalizations. “Software engineer” applies to a massive variety of people, all across gender & sexual identity spectrums, socioeconomic backgrounds, races, ancestries, religious beliefs, favorite sports teams, food preferences, political opinions, etc.

What you’ve written up sounds like a sanctimonious appeal to make yourself sound more “blue collar” especially by choosing to describe diversity in your apartment building based essentially solely on occupation status and implicitly contrasting engineers with “needing to use kindness to relate to each other” (something all my engineer coworkers seem to be exceptionally good at, for instance).

I’d be willing to wager highly that if you are having trouble socializing with engineering peers, you are probably the reason for the trouble. If you can’t find exceptionally wide diversity in a very generic field like software engineering, it suggests you’re not trying very hard.