> Computer scientists currently have a lot of prestige. [...] Now I’d say that computer science today is like economics at the beginning of the century or Freudian psychiatry in the 1950s in being at apex academic and social prestige and influence. Computer scientists, or computer-science-associated businessmen, are the new gurus, in a way that wasn’t the case before. Yes, Steve Jobs and Bill Gates were culture heroes back in the 80s and 90s, but nobody was particularly interested in what they had to say outside of their narrow technological realms. Nowadays, many computer scientists and tech lords present themselves, and are often taken as, all-purpose pundits. (Many of the tech lords are actually tech investors; they’ve absorbed the prestige of information science through the transitive property of money.) As with the economists and Freudians of past eras, they are presented as having some special authority derived in part from their almost inhuman hyper-rationality, a willingness to tell uncomfortable truths.

This is an insanely US-centric perspective. In Germany, being a programmer is more like what is described in the song "Code Monkey" by Jonathan Coulton:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qYodWEKCuGg

Update: Just to be clear: there exist tides when programmers are more vs less tolerated (during the dot-com bubble, the tolerance for programmers was larger), but programmers were always very far from the apex of any "prestige" (whatever you associate with this term) hierarchy.

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big_toast a day ago | parent [-]

What disciplines are near the apex of prestige in germany over the last few decades?

	▲	aleph_minus_one 19 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		I would say that currently the German society is a very riven/divided one, with various groups being bitter enemies, each with their very own contradictory hiearchies with very different groups at the apex. So, to find out which disciplines could be at the apex of prestige, I apply the criterion "What do you want your child to become when they grow up?" for various, very different social groups. I would claim that the following list consists of very plausible answers (again: be aware that each of these jobs can easily be a low-prestige or even fiercely hated one by a different social group): - doctor, dentist - pharmacist (be nevertheless aware that in opposite to former times, this is not a license to print money anymore) - judge, prosecutor, notary (but rather not "Rechtsanwalt" [barrister?]; there exist war too many "Rechtsanwälte" [barristers?], so that the competition among them can be fierce) - business consultant, "Wirtschaftsprüfer" [auditor] - patent attorney - don't study (too theoretical): get a vocational training in skilled crafts and trades instead - high-ranking "Beamter" [civil servant] - professor (be aware that it depends a lot on the social group whether or which discipline is considered to be prestigious or frowned upon) -- Remark: concerning "engineer" (in the very classical sense of "special cases of physics" engineering discliplines; German law is very strict what an "Ingenieur" [engineer] is [1], [2]), I would claim that it is not considered to be an "apex of prestige" one, but depending on the social group a respected choice of study/job. -- [1] https://www.ingenieur.de/karriere/arbeitsrecht/ingenieurgese... [2] https://de.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Ingenieur&oldid=2...
	▲	mejutoco a day ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Lawyers