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It's weird, I've harped on a few of these points in conversations with others (usually when talking about "sexy careers", and why people don't hold coders in the same regard as doctors) but your words made me realize why I'm trying to become a developer. The dealing with the machine rather than people is something I'm willing to run with more than anything, right now. Not wholly a function of unmet needs, but addressing a specific change I'd like to make.

The dealing with the machine rather than people is something I'm willing to run with more than anything, right now.

Software engineering is an incredibly people-focused career. You will need to be able to work with other devs, stakeholders, support, users.. everyone really. Going into a tech career thinking that it's somewhere you can avoid people is never going to work out well.

I don't exactly think that. It's more like I would like to transpose more of my energy into fighting with a machine, and less into people, because my job is 90/10 dealing with execs and their bespoke, unmanageable concerns right now vs making something happen with technology. Could be a grass is greener thing. Maybe to current devs this comment looks crazy, I really wouldn't know yet.

I enjoy working with people, actually. My current role is rapidly changing that.

This has not been my experience at all. I do see this in the management layers, even with team leads, but the typical IC engineer does NOT spend any significant time talking with stakeholders, support, or users. They do have to work with other devs, but even that is frequently over chat, and not as much in-person, though it depends on the particular people and the company culture.

Yes, you really can go into a tech career and avoid talking to people much, much more than other careers. Just stay out of management if you don't like talking to people.

Are these the engineers who exert no control over their environments and just sit back and bitterly complain while taking no steps to resolve the issues? Those engineers who complain about "stupid management decisions" yet have made no real effort to influence the people and processes which led to those decisions? Sure. You can be a developer and avoid talking to humans as much as possible. You're just not going to be as effective or impactful as someone who does navigate those people problems. The technology is the easy part. How effectively companies navigate human problems makes a huge difference in how effectively they can implement technology solutions and engineers who can help solve those problems are invaluable.

Maybe you worked in some small companies or something where ICs can actually talk to customers, but when you're working in a 100,000 person company, that simply isn't something you do. If you go over your managers' head, they tend to get very angry, and that's just within the company, to say nothing about unsolicited contacts with customers from someone in a position that isn't customer-facing.

I'm currently working for a company which has over 350k employees. My previous company had over 100k. The company before that had over 220k employees. Literally every single one of them is starved of engineers who give enough fucks to speak up.

No. This is not how reality works.

They are not starved of engineers who "give enough fucks to speak up", they are starved of management who are invested and take enough responsibility to solicit direct feedback from the "assembly line" engineers and then make short term concessions on behalf of long term interests in defiance of what shareholders prefer.

Here is a quote from (imho) one of the top 5 greatest engineers of the 20th century, if not the number 1 greatest engineering leader:

> A major flaw in our system of government, and even in industry, is the latitude allowed to do less than is necessary. Too often officials are willing to accept and adapt to situations they know to be wrong. The tendency is to downplay problems instead of actively trying to correct them. Recognizing this, many subordinates give up, contain their views within themselves, and wait for others to take action. When this happens, the manager is deprived of the experience and ideas of subordinates who generally are more knowledgeable than he in their particular areas.

It's also worth reflecting on Pournelle's Law of Bureaucracy: https://www.jerrypournelle.com/reports/jerryp/iron.html

The only result of fighting the incentive structure put in place by management (far too often: punishment for pushed deadlines, reward for cutting corners) as an engineer is mental illness.

The least effective ICs I ever ran into were those who brooded in front of their PC without communicating adequately with others. As a result, they didn't understand the requirements, built stuff that didn't meet the team's needs, and generally wasted a ton of time on stuff that needed to be redone.

This is true, but I only learnt about it after many years into this career, and to be honest I don't enjoy it very much. I still enjoy working with machines more than people.

Right but you can tell all those people “this idea is literally impossible, the machine cannot do it” and at least some of them will listen to you.

Whereas in, say, government, people can just believe any stupid idea they want for an indefinite period of time.

As you can tell, I’m great with people. :)

any person earnestly applying a nerd and jock mentality to adult life should find a nice patch of grass to touch and talk to more people

The words are shortcuts for larger more complex ideas about primary motivations and goals. Reward structures learned as children and maturing young adults are definitely going to influence, subconsciously or consciously, adult behavior and understandings about how the world works.

Here is Paul Graham using the word "nerd" and talking about the greater more complex idea: https://paulgraham.com/nerds.html

I don't think goals and motivations are a monolith just for people who like computers, or STEM, or who socialize less in high school because 'they didn't want to play the popularity game'. this worldview is reductive, and wholly unaware how growing up is different for everybody. Just be aware before you judge people.

Did you read more than the first sentence of this comment before replying? I'm up in the air on it but it deserves more discussion and less mental laziness than you're showing here.

Well said. I mean, I'd like to see a graph of "wizard" rate per profession, maybe even per country for curiosity matters. I'd bet my arm that programmers have it pretty bad on that front.

> Doctor, lawyer, and athlete are "jock" professions, while software engineering is very much a "nerd" profession. These words represent status and general level of attractiveness and therefore access to attention and sex.

This is just your perspective and, IMO, it's pretty warped. Software engineering is not a low-status position, even compared to doctors and lawyers. You aren't lacking in status or not having sex because you're a software engineer getting paid $200k/year instead of a doctor paid $200k/year.

> Furthermore, the whole point of the vast majority of software engineering is to sell loot boxes to kids to increase shareholder wealth for a pittance of the wealth created (or something not too different from that for at least 60% of companies).

Lawyers have to defend clients they know are guilty to help rapists and murderers walk free, and file IP lawsuits for patents they know are bullshit so that their client can siphon off a settlement from a large company, just because it's cheaper than a court battle. Lawyers have been widely (and unfairly!) regarded as one of the most despised professions since Shakespeare.[0] Professional atheletes have long been subject of the media debate over being paid "too much" compared to the value they bring to society. Even if they were broadly perceived as providing negative value to society, which I don't believe, software developers would not be unique.

> To put it bluntly, many bad parents abandoned their kids to the internet where they found solace. Software engineering is a natural extension of spending too much time using the internet and becoming curious how it works.

This is becoming less and less true. Many junior devs who were born post-2000 that I talk to never had a computer growing up other than their phone, and their first real experience with PCs came in high school and university.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Let%27s_kill_all_the_lawyers

> Software engineering is not a low-status position

Pay is not status. Software currently pays quite well, but in most companies today a developer is at the very bottom of the status curve. Developers are no longer allowed any say in what to build or how to build it, they are micromanaged by product managers and program managers and team managers and required to give daily status reports ("agile").

(I say "used to" because in the 90s developers were a high status role. You got to make all decisions and execute on them with great independence. Pay was much lower but respect was much higher.)

The other stress factor is that developers get decreasing respect every year they age. This is in contrast with basically every other professional role where experience is highly valued. Nobody wants the rookie heart surgeon, everyone wants the 60 year old who has done it thousands of times. But nobody wants a 60 year old software engineer.

>Developers are no longer allowed any say in what to build or how to build it, they are micromanaged by product managers and program managers and team managers and required to give daily status reports ("agile").

I don't see how this is a bad thing, for a large and complicated product. For a small company where a team of 5 people can do the whole thing, sure, you don't need all this management, though I think some parts of the Agile methodology can be useful just for keeping people in sync. I worked in a small-ish team a while ago using an Agile methodology and it was fine: the program manager basically told us the feedback from the customer, and then it was up to us to decide what features to make to keep the customer happy and how to do it and how to schedule it. The Agile methodology just forced us to have regular meetings, and made it easy for the outside stakeholders to keep tabs on us and attend our meetings when necessary. Having daily habits in your life isn't a bad thing for many people, and that's basically what Agile was, in my experience: a way of having habits.

>Pay was much lower but respect was much higher.

No, it really wasn't. Maybe within the profession, but not to society at-large. Developers back then had little respect, until they started making lots of money in the dot-com boom, then people starting respecting the profession a bit more. Software development has never gotten the respect that doctors and lawyers get.

>Nobody wants the rookie heart surgeon, everyone wants the 60 year old who has done it thousands of times.

This might have some truth, but it's a bad view: generally, older surgeons prefer to use older surgical techniques that they learned decades ago, since they weren't trained on the newest techniques. The newer techniques generally are much less invasive and have faster recovery times. It's better to go with younger surgeons who have more modern training, but still some experience (i.e., not fresh out).

> Pay is not status. Software currently pays quite well, but in most companies today a developer is at the very bottom of the status curve.

This is your own perspective, and again, it's extremely warped. If you think developers are at the very bottom of the status curve, go sign up to be your company's janitor, receptionist, HR/"talent acquisition", junior accountant, or any "operations"/"administration" role. Someone's gotta order and restock all the free beer and snacks in your office, you know.

And other than the janitor, those positions are all still likely 9-5 salaried positions that pay decently. Go be a retail worker, hotel staff, or waiter/waitress and enjoy being shit on by both your manager and your customers all day. Then come back and talk about how being a software dev is low status.

You are woefully misinformed if you think that doctors have a significant say in their day to day work.

My sister is in medicine. Her entire day, down to each 30 minute block, is prescheduled for her. Often, she is forced to see multiple patients at once to increase revenues. The services that she is allowed to provide are governed by a completely separate insurance company. Strict metrics are tracked about the outcomes of each visit, including things like "how often did you see somebody for 35 minutes because that way you could charge for a full hour but spend less of your time."

This is far worse than anything I have ever experienced in software regarding tickets coming down from PMs or tracking of the amount of code committed in a week.

> You are woefully misinformed if you think that doctors have a significant say in their day to day work.

But then, I did not say that.

I said doctors get more respect as they gain experience, which is true.

As do engineers.

> This is just your perspective and, IMO, it's pretty warped. Software engineering is not a low-status position, even compared to doctors and lawyers. You aren't lacking in status or not having sex because you're a software engineer getting paid $200k/year instead of a doctor paid $200k/year.

I find that it definitely points to a time period when someone entered maybe not workforce, but the "IT world" let's say.

There was a time when programming in many places had definitely "unsexy" vibe among general population, with a lot of, well, painful "jokes", and all of that definitely set a "theme".

fast forward a decade or so to 2010 and suddenly IT is no longer that place where only losers go.

As it turns out, the massive money generated by software produces quite a lot of status.

But the IT world is meaningfully different from software engineering. IT infrastructure (as distinct from creating software) pays less, generally, and is also regarded as much lower-status. IT is like auto mechanics to software engineering's automobile design. It's the blue collar equivalent, especially at the low level. At the high level, as far as I understand, it morphs with "cloud-engineering" or just general management and becomes higher-status.

Unfortunately, I think this comes from how the entrance into IT is gated by working on low-level ("have you tried turning it off and on again?") problems, and putting slightly awkward, new-to-the-workforce nerds in a position where they need to help a lot of people with their computer problems. Many of whom are (understandably!) frustrated that their computer systems aren't working and/or don't totally understand why they won't work. So IT gets to see people at their worst and most frustrated, and people get to see IT at its most awkward and least experienced. So hostility forms on both sides. And first impressions sometimes last very long.

The massive amounts of money is, largely, a post-2010 thing too.

Before that, some hugely successful people in software outside of "nerd" circles were discussed often in terms disconnected with tech and more as just other (if wildly successful, like Bill Gates) business people.

The stigma is different now.

It’s not “you’re a loser”. It’s “you make a lot of money while ruining the world for everyone else.” Look at the jokes about Zuckerberg imitating a human.

He’s obviously one of the most powerful people in the world. But looked down upon by creating a socially harmful product. Like cigarette company or oil company CEOs.

> You aren't lacking in status or not having sex because you're a software engineer getting paid $200k/year instead of a doctor paid $200k/year.

If you don’t think male doctors have more opportunities with women than male software engineers, other things being equal, I can’t take you seriously.

Software developers usually have managers of various sorts of supervisors. This is classical division of worker / manager in the Taylorist sense, as in the managers are mostly not developers themselves.

This is what makes software developers a low status profession, i.e. many developers are glorified assembly line workers with little agency over their work (they do not make decisions).

Doctors and lawyers might have some form of management layer, but this is mostly a support function.