I think you are conflating software engineering and regular management. If your definition of success and job satisfaction is climbing up the corporate ladder y

I think you are conflating software engineering and regular management. If your definition of success and job satisfaction is climbing up the corporate ladder you don’t need software engineering at all. You could go into sales or marketing and climb faster. Having said that software engineering matters. If it didn’t matter a lot of things we take for granted in 2019 wouldn’t exist, like this message board or the tiny ‘supercomputer’ you carry in your hand called smartphone. MRI Imaging, Fly-by-wire software, cashless transactions.. I could go on and on.