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Comment by karaterobot | Hacker News Reader

I always find it funny how engineers have a caste system. Systems engineers look down their noses at application engineers, everyone looks down at web developers. But it used to be that mechanical engineers looked down at electrical engineers, who looked down at all software engineers. I like to imagine a Roman engineer judging a medieval siege engineer by whether they can build an aqueduct or not, and the siege engineer judging a Victorian civil engineer by whether they know how to make a simple, run of the mill catapult.

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Why are web devs at the bottom of this totem pole? It's a very multi-disciplinary job, often requiring expertise in a handful of languages, UI, design, distributed systems, etc.

Web devs, these days, are a very different animal, from the old HTML jockeys.

Most rich Web sites, nowadays, have quite a bit going on (and that is often reflected in massive page loads).

I don't think they should be, and I don't think that belief is as prevalent anymore. But when I was starting out, there was a real divide even between people who wrote server code and people who wrote front end code for the same product, let alone among programmers who worked on lower level or more abstract things. I assume because the web jobs were newer, and more people back in the 90s-00s had moved into those jobs from places other than the traditional CS or engineering professional tracks. But I always felt like web development was really, really hard to be good at.

Web dev looks sort of like graphic design without the artistry, from an outside point of view.

Depends what you’re making. And there’s a lot of non UI technical work.

When doing an EE undergrad, the ranking I saw was:

ChemE > EE > MechE > Civil.

I guess there could be a bias, maybe MechE’s would swap their spots and ours. But I don’t think it is a totally universal thing. The fact that ChemE was some impossibly difficult magical alchemy stuff that nobody outside of their program could understand was universally agreed upon though.

I mean, it’s all goofy inter-field teasing and anybody who takes it too seriously is a dummy anyway.

I would say that civil engineers probably have more on the line, than anyone else. They can kill people, and go to jail, more often, than any of the others (where doing so is more of an exception, and with civil engineers, it's the norm).

That’s probably why they don’t do anything cool. :p

Arguably that's part of why that order might be the way that it is: Civil Engineering has existed long enough to have criminal liability and defined jail terms. The others are younger (sometimes far younger) and much less experienced with things like the justice system (and the justice system less experienced with them in turn).

Current EE undergrad (one semester left) and my university doesn't have ChemE so I'm sitting comfortably at the top of the chain :^)

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