[SubiculumCode]

There is something about software engineering, and I'm going to get hammered for this, that seems to convince people that everyone are idiots and doing it all wrong. It might be from personal experience explaining their field to family and friends, or perhaps it's brought about by constantly building things for themselves, idk. They seem to have especial disdain for scientists, who have a long and stories reputation as the intellectual elite, which might just rub their egos the wrong way.

[nnvvhh]

I think the superiority felt by some software engineers stems from the simple fact that they are paid a lot and are seen as smart and valuable in the culture. They have economic power, and work on something that seems incomprehensible to many everyday people. The subject matter may also have something to do with it. We're taught that lots of problems can have their details reduced and abstracted away, and I think engineers can ignore the normal human elements of life that have a real effect.

This is more armchair Freudish, but I also think that a feeling of intellectual superiority makes up for other areas that are lacking in similar feelings of value and power. Life as a computer science student is not cool or fun or sexy, so you fall back on what gives you power in wider society. Sort of like the idea that poor whites fall back onto their whiteness. People jockey for position using whatever they have.

[0_____0]

Not only are they paid a lot, but they basically start their careers being paid lavishly in places like the SF Bay Area. To a 22 year old fresh grad, what does it tell you when life immediately rewards you with a top 10% income bracket out of university?

This extends to the techno-elite as well. What drives the CEO of an electric car company to declare that the way to improve urban mobility is to build roads in tunnels underground? Well, clearly he must be doing something right, he's the richest man on earth!

[spiralx]

> They seem to have especial disdain for scientists, who have a long and stories reputation as the intellectual elite, which might just rub their egos the wrong way.

Doubly so for anything vaguely related to social sciences and other fields where theorising from first principles isn't the norm. "Historical" sciences such as astrophysics and epidemiology often get short shrift here as well. Engineers in general seem to be prone to opining outside of their area of expertise, the Salem Hypothesis that a creationist with an advanced degree was more likely to be an engineer than any other field was noted back in the early days of Usenet:

https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Engineers_and_woo

[UnFleshedOne]

To be fair, given recent reproducibility fiasco, social sciences were scorned for a good reason.

[Teever]

Is there anything to indicate that computer science and computer engineering will avoid their own reproducibility fiasco?

[AnimalMuppet]

Well... there's computer science, and then there's computer science.

All (most of?) the stuff done on P vs NP is good science that will stand up.

Studies on which language features make it better for developers are social science, because they involve those pesky humans. That stuff is likely to suffer from a reproducibility crisis.

[SubiculumCode]

reproducibility in social sciences is usually a function of a)insurmountable costs of recruiting participants, b)complexity of the questions, and c) lack of standardization of humans. Sure social scientists would like to have N=1 billion, but they'd be lucky to get funding for 1,000.

[UnFleshedOne]

One of the problems is that the humans used were pretty standard -- all psychology students. Also publication bias.

[SubiculumCode]

can't win. If your sample isn't diverse enough it isn't representative. It it is representative, its likely too small to get a reliable effect due to the number of confounds.

[SubiculumCode]

what a great link. Thanks for sharing.

[ghostwriter]

> They seem to have especial disdain for scientists, who have a long and stories reputation as the intellectual elite, which might just rub their egos the wrong way.

another reason could be that the level of reproducibility of results and openness and availability of sources (data, code, papers) in modern "science" branches is appallingly low for the software folks to take them (the scientists and their results) seriously by default.