Our fellow nerds, doctors and lawyers, somehow got star treatment by hollywood, while our kind is usually portrayed as unattractive, awkward, laughing stock and at best a passive character in an assisting role. This tragically reflects on our perception in the real world.
This keeps surprising me again and again, but apparently any kind of computing device is a black box built on magic, probably to the vast majority out there.
The lack of intellectual curiosity in the general populace is dismaying to me, but it was ever thus.
What? Are you living in the same world as me?
Pretty much every industry apart from manual labour or craftsmanship related work uses software. If you work in an office chances you spend most of your time using software.
Then people go home and play on their smartphones which connect to back-end API servers developed by software engineers or stream films of netflix, also developed by software engineers.
People all have a basic idea of what makes you ill, what various diseases, treatments etc. are. But most people don't understand the intricacies of the endocrine system.
People all have a basic understanding of the law, what kind of sentences to expect for what crimes, how court works etc. But most people don't understand <INSERT_COMPLICATED_ASPECT_OF_LAW>.
You see where I am going with this..
People all have a basic idea of how the internet works (you connect to the network and data is returned to your computer), the difference between 4G and Wi-fi etc. But most people won't be able to explain the difference between RSA cryptogrpahy and eliptic curve cryptography.
Concerning the "Hollywood argument": if I think how Hollywood demands DRM in evermore standards and to infect your life, not being liked by Hollywood is one of the best advertisements for programming jobs that exist.
By contrast, understanding what some computer people even do is hard for the layman (no obvious power), and until pretty recently computers did not make you a lot of money. We also let pretty much any idiot with a computer write code, it is not a position of status.
Shows like Mr. Robot and Silicon Valley are already starting to show how perception is changing. Nerds still get made fun of, but you can't be laughing too much at filthy rich entrepreneurs or hackers who do whatever they want to drug dealers, the police, etc.