Comment by shiomiru
12 hours ago
I meant it as an euphemism for "it's universally sought after (i.e., you'll probably find a job)". Few would think being a programmer gives you some kind of special "social status"; it's always been a "nerd" hobby that happened to pay (relatively) well.
(I guess by now you have a solid retirement plan; maybe if the field had been burnt to the ground while you were younger, you'd have had a different opinion.)
Being a good programmer gives you special social status amongst people who value programming. You only have to look at how people talk about others as slop coders and seek to expand their coding reputations. Those people are the most threatened by AI because of how it implicates their carefully crafted personas as coding gurus and keepers of knowledge.
It also gives you a special social status amongst people who do not understand programming: nobody wants to talk to you, at least not about your job.