I've been doing this a while, and have found that prestige from non techis, for us engineers, is based on the company we work for. Tell someone you're an engine

I've been doing this a while, and have found that prestige from non techis, for us engineers, is based on the company we work for. Tell someone you're an engineer at google or facebook and you get the prestige. Tell them you're a programmer at some startup they've never heard of and their like "yeah, whatever". I think a lot of it has to do with people overusing the term "engineer". I know people with that work for the phone company that have lower skill jobs but still get the title "network engineer" or some such. Normal people can't distinguish between this and the hard profession.