In my experience it's the programmers who can ONLY program that get little respect. The ones that can also understand other problem domains (business/people/pro

In my experience it's the programmers who can ONLY program that get little respect. The ones that can also understand other problem domains (business/people/processes) tend to get respect no matter what their job title, even in technology companies. So Zed is right - programming is most powerful as a tool to be applied to more interesting problems.