For the record, I don't live in the US and only spent 3 of my 10 years of full-time software development at startups (my own). The US is just a convenient and

For the record, I don't live in the US and only spent 3 of my 10 years of full-time software development at startups (my own). The US is just a convenient and familiar frame of reference. There always exists a context where a given person is on the low end of the totem pole. You can almost always shift the goal-posts by moving around within society to find a place where you're a relative dunce. It seems totally plausible to me that programmers aren't at the top of the food-chain in positions in non-software companies. But if you go out into the broader world ... the world where my brother works at Walgreens and my sister is a tour guide at the zoo, where my best friend just got fired and is about to move back in with her mom, my grandfather sold tractors and my mom is an elementary school teacher ... in that world being a computer programmer is a respected trade. I feel like you zoomed out some, but if you zoom out even further, all of the sudden being a programmer is respected again. You're right that we orientate ourselves relative to our peers and that's the lens that we see the world through, but the broader world isn't all white-collar knowledge-workers. As a somewhat disconnected point, and this probably partially owing to the fact that most of my professional experience is in Europe, being a 30-something programmer here is totally normal. In fact, I'm 31 and most of the programmers I've worked with have been older than me. The median age seems to be more 35-ish, with a lot of people still working in normal programming positions into their 40s and 50s. The distribution here more seems to follow the pattern of there simply being a lot more people that started programming in the 90s or 2000s than in the 70s or 80s rather than a particularly strong age bias against programmers. I've also not experienced the total lack of interest in programming. Lots of my friends -- most of who are non-technical -- ask questions about it. I suspect part of the problem may simply be that a lot of programmers aren't particularly good communicators.