Is It Finally Time To Stop Deifying Engineers?

It was probably time about six years ago, but maybe now we’ll actually get there.

I don’t know exactly when the deification of engineers started en masse, but it’s probably tied at some level to the rise of Silicon Valley — which you can really take back to the 1970s, but is perhaps most pronounced with the rise of Apple and then the post-2008 recession period, when it seemed like every company in Topeka needed nap pods if they wanted investors to care about them. Somewhere along the line, the biggest companies in the world (and thus the richest men in the world) were often led by programmers, coders, and engineers — and it seemed like that was all we started talking about. When COVID ramped up the WFH vs. RTO argument (which is still ongoing, oddly), I cannot tell you how many articles I came across that said RTO was necessary because “… we need to train and provide collaboration opportunities for junior engineers,” as if every other job didn’t exist. Do junior HR people not need training? I’d argue they need more training than engineers.

We got really into this whole engineering concept and praising engineers and framing every future of work article around engineers, and while it’s no doubt a crucial role in society, there are also many other roles in society, especially…