[dba7dba]

I can't imagine a programmer making enough $$ to be able to show up at an event where the main goal is donation.

Granted some did show up.

Let's list the careers that were still considered safe age 50. Doctor. Lawyer. Professor. All important, no doubt. But which one of those truly helped advance our society or nation? As in improving GDP or trade balance?

Most likely not.

But the other engineers (some with uncertain future) are the ones who designed/built/produced something for the society.

[IkmoIkmo]

> Doctor. Lawyer. Professor. All important, no doubt. But which one of those truly helped advance our society or nation? As in improving GDP or trade balance?

Ehh... all three? Try running a country without them and see where your GDP ends up. As for 'truly helped advance' and linking that to just GDP is incredibly myopic.

I have all the respect in the world for engineers but let's not fetishise over them.

[dba7dba]

Eh, maybe I was a bit harsh. But still, consider this.

Doctor: Was the doctor in research?

Lawyer: No comment.

Professor: How good was his research? Or was he one of those the taught from same note year after year and just took credit for work done by grad students?

And my mistake in linking it just to GDP. How about advancing the society by building better tools, transportation, medicine, improve efficiency in this/that?

[IkmoIkmo]

Sure I'll consider it

First of all, what's with that standard? 'if you didn't invent something new, e.g. through research, it doesn't count.' Or, if you kept things together without making progress, it doesn't count? So a police officer or a fireman or a nurse, who cares about that, they're not advancing society because they didn't happen to build a better tool or a new medicine. I mean what are you even arguing here?

And second, alright so let's apply your standard to engineers who spend their entire lives applying laws of physics they didn't invent or models that existed for decades, sometimes even before they were born. e.g. designing the 10000th sewage system in just another city according to existing principles, would you call that 'taking credit for work done by grad students / previous engineers' and dismiss it as unimportant, when it's a truly significant part of society? And how do you rate a software engineer building the millionth crud app for some use case? Say like Hacker News? Unimportant? Of course not.

I mean the heuristic here to help think about value is to remove from society/laborforce for a moment anyone who ever does something that's already done before. And then keep anyone who's building something new. And then compare it with the opposite. The former will result in chaos, the latter will result in a more or less stable society with a lack of progress.

Now obviously you need both. If we didn't have the guys doing new stuff, we'd still be living like we did 50k years ago. But we need both, and the implication that it's somehow only engineers who do the new stuff just isn't true. I mean hell just consider how far engineers get without the professor teaching them all those lame things other people already figured out like laws of physics.

Anyway I get the feeling I'm misconstruing your points but you kept offering questions as things to consider so I just try to interpret what you're implying as best I can. Feel free to just concretely make your point instead.

[mcguire]

Just out of curiosity, have you ever installed a toilet?

[logicchains]

Software engineers can also take pride in the fact that any career success we achieve is the result of the value we produce, and is not just due to regulatory/structural limitations reducing the number of competitors in our field.

[gohrt]

or due to how well you can 45-minute-puzzler your way into a butt warming a seat at a bigco.