I think our society tends to offer respect and status to others for some specific (mostly superficial) reasons, and developers usually don't meet the criteria.

I think our society tends to offer respect and status to others for some specific (mostly superficial) reasons, and developers usually don't meet the criteria. I can think of a few different cases of this: 1. I feel society respects people with authority over others and most developers have none. Most of us are just implementing someone else's high level idea (granted, a great idea implemented poorly can be useless, so good developers are very important in fact. It just isn't clear to an outsider as to why). 2. We also respect others who have great social skills, but the word "coder" or "developer" tends to conjure up an image of some guy sitting behind a computer screen by himself for hours on end (if you knew nothing about what a software developer really does). Some devs will have good social skills, some will not, but I would imagine the average developer job does not necessarily require it. 3. The stakes matter. If a developer screws up, you revert the change or fix the bug and most of the time the worst case scenario is that the company lost some money (with some exceptions like those who work on self driving cars or autopilot). Doctors are dealing with peoples lives. Law enforcement, firefighters and military risk their own lives for others. Lawyers and high level executives at larger companies work in positions where the economic stakes are often high, not just occasionally. 4. We respect those who are at the top of their respective field. With software development, there is nothing that those at the top of the field are displaying to the public that differentiates them from anyone else in the field (that the average non developer can understand, anyway). This is very clear if you're an athlete or professional musician. I would say that software developers as a group are usually fairly intelligent people with respect to technology. I think referring to someone as a "techie" does not make an assumption that someone isn't knowledgable about the domain of tech, but may come embedded with an assumption of lower status (with respect to the points I mentioned above). As a developer myself, I do sometimes regret my choice given the low status that this job carries (at least in North America - perhaps in other parts of the world this is different) in spite of the fact I get paid fairly well. On the other hand, I enjoy writing code and solving difficult technical problems, so if I just forget about what people I don't know think about me, then the job is great. Hard to beat a comfortable, high paying job where I get to work on interesting problems and mostly get to avoid the annoying political battles that are often ongoing in large orgs.