> That being said, I’m not following how attitudes in software engineering are related to the topic of this post.
Sorry, I probably made my point poorly. It wasn't about attitude in software engineering. It was how insanely overvalued the field is, with a completely out of wack investment to reward ratio. Few to no other fields come even close, and its siphoning people from all other fields as well as creating unreasonable expectations from them. That's obviously not the root cause, but it's something to ponder.
Essentially, all I was saying is that the article made me think about how crazy the contrast between those 2 professions is.
The worst part is that on average developers are still often underpaid. In some cases grotesquely. Some individual engineers can easily account for millions in revenue in a year to the company they work for, but they are only paid upwards of a few hundred thousand. On the flipside there are certainly a lot of people employed in industry making their companies negative revenue - costing developer hours to make up for their mistakes or ineptitude worth less than the working code they produce.
Software is eating the world in almost all regards. Being able to perform that act - the eating part - makes you way more valuable than the effort required. But so long as characters can translate into dollars for someone the one making the characters will remain very valuable.
Don't for a second be "ashamed" if someone is offering to pay you large sums of money for what you think isn't worth it - the ugly fact of reality is that we don't get to set the value of our time, those with the money to buy it do. Society is offering little money to teachers and that sucks, but that has nothing to do with code being so valuable as to justify abnormal incomes relative to the average of the rest of the working class.
The “out of whack investment to reward ratio” is the fundamental mechanism of capitalism. It’s how we get enough of what we need, motivating self interested actors to provide it. We should be terrified if it isn’t happening somewhere, or else rejoice that every demand everywhere has already been met.
Sorry, I probably made my point poorly. It wasn't about attitude in software engineering. It was how insanely overvalued the field is, with a completely out of wack investment to reward ratio. Few to no other fields come even close, and its siphoning people from all other fields as well as creating unreasonable expectations from them. That's obviously not the root cause, but it's something to ponder.
Essentially, all I was saying is that the article made me think about how crazy the contrast between those 2 professions is.