[tptacek]

This is more truth-y than true. If occupational prestige drove employment, we'd all be firefighters. And, of course, when you actually look at occupational prestige figures, engineers crush lawyers. Really, there's no axis on which your hypothesis explains anything.

[TheOtherHobbes]

Which explains why politics - which by definition is full of people who have enough status to set national policy - is full of engineers, while the lawyers are left discussing the finer technical points of voir dire on Lawyer News.

[tptacek]

Not that I'm saying you constructed it this way intentionally, but this argument is the rhetorical equivalent of one of those Highlights For Children "How Many Things Can You Spot Wrong With This Picture" puzzles; including, at least:

* The notion that politicians occupy high-status careers

* The notion that it's the status held by politicians that is the reason they're allowed to set national policy

* The notion that your intuition about status trumps the actual numbers for occupational prestige, which are (a) easily found and (b) immediately refute both the premise and conclusion of this argument

* The notion that most lawyers are on a track to become politicians

* The notion that lawyers would be overrepresented among politicians because people love lawyers that much, and not because the top echelons of law are disproportionately well compensated, or because those people make decades-long careers out of making connections with businesses and power brokers

* The notion that you can evaluate the overall status hierarchy position of a career solely by observing it's top echelon (here: national office-holders, and not city council-people)

[TheOtherHobbes]

Your primary failure was confusing personal popularity with social popularity with status/agency/influence. You're - mostly - continuing to make the same mistake.

Of course status is defined by caste power and social agency. What else would it be defined by? Facebook likes?

The fact that no one much likes lawyers is irrelevant. So is the fact that lawyers individually may fail to make a living from lawyering, or even that a few outliers have a social conscience.

Let me know when an engineer becomes president of the US and we can talk about the other details.

>not because the top echelons of law are disproportionately well compensated, or because those people make decades-long careers out of making connections with businesses and power brokers

This confuses cause and effect. The point of becoming a certain kind of lawyer is exactly because it's the best way to gain status and self-serving influence through that kind of activity.

Writing a compiler will never get you that kind of status, no matter what gender you are.

Nor will making a cool app.

Becoming a billionaire might. But tech billionaires tend to become billionaires because they act in aggressively self-serving ways in business and/or are well-connected, not because they're rewarded purely for being brilliant engineers.

Engineering brilliance on its own will get you GitHub stars and conferences and maybe a job or two. But no more than that.

Still don't believe me? Ask a few thousand people outside tech who their favourite engineer is.

That's how high-status engineering is.

[ameister14]

Hoover was a mining engineer, so there's one.

[tptacek]

  Obama - Law
  Bush - Business 
  Clinton - Law
  Bush - Business
  Reagan - Actor
  Carter - Nuclear Engineer & Farmer
  Ford - Law
  Nixon - Law
  LBJ - HS Teacher
  JFK - Econ 
  Ike - Military
  Truman - No degree
  FDR - Law
  Hoover - Engineer
  Coolidge - Law
  Harding - Journalist
  Wilson - Law Prof
  Taft - Law
  Teddy Roosevelt - History & Politics

Law is clearly the modal occupation for presidents, but there's some diversity.

[crazy1van]

Or politics is filled with lawyers because most politicians are legislators and their main job is to pass laws...