I don't know if it has changed, but one thing I enjoyed about living in Finland in the early 2000s was that a janitor and a director at a company were given the same respect. If was more about contributing to the society.

Your comment on SRE -> server janitor is interesting. Especially in the land of DevOps. Companies are looking for ways out, to have people do multiple things and not necessarily acknowledge complexity, experience when things go sideways, etc.

Being able to get things to run smoothly, having the background to know when X happens and where to look, being able to plan and intelligently navigate future capacity, etc. is incredibly important. The ops roles that used to exist, places like Google keep them, but a lot of companies do not.