[potatolicious]

I feel that you're over-romanticizing traditional engineering. I'm a mechanical engineer by education (who knows how I ended up here, oops) and went to school with many civil, chemical, and electrical engineers.

Their jobs have as much corporate-ism and debilitating big management as ours. Perhaps more, since there's a distinct lack of startups in those arenas.

Sure, what they do has a boatload of ethics and standards that apply to it (unlike software, which is still very much fly by the seat of your pants), but they sure as hell don't have a lot of autonomy. Most traditional engineers also answer to managers, and build the equivalent of CRUD apps to pay the bills and get promoted.

I suppose by your sentiment no one is a professional.