This hits on something that really bothered me in some of the Quora responses, particularly from those who had worked at Google: they smugness and superiority.

This hits on something that really bothered me in some of the Quora responses, particularly from those who had worked at Google: they smugness and superiority. In some ways, for some people, it could be well earned: someone took an idea from abstract concept to implemented algorithm and maybe even to a library or product and changed the world, to some degree. Other software engineers, performing more mundane tasks, might also change the world. Howell's product certainly made a very positive difference for me and I leveraged this to get my own work done faster. I think we can all come up with many examples of software that's impacted our lives that doesn't revolve around a unique computer science discovery but instead, like Homebrew, solves a problem in a practical and accessible way. This isn't in the text, but I am left with the feeling that software engineers who ended up (because life, etc.) working in less math-heavy roles are somehow inferior, and I just don't believe that. Working through BS level comp-sci coursework at a decent college is a significant achievement for those students, at that age, and should not be diminished. But to imply that those working in the field who have not had the good luck to have found interesting computer science problems to solve, who have instead worked at simply improving existing products or focusing on products that meet another need (i.e. accounting, communication, etc.) are not "really" software engineers is, in my opinion, going too far.