1) Doctors and lawyers are seen as exercising judgment, while engineers are seen as building things.
2) Training opportunities (in the "learn by doing" sense of "training") for doctors and lawyers are much harder to come by than for engineers. If you're looking for a lawyer who has taken half a dozen big commercial litigations through trial, you're probably looking for someone very old because there just aren't very many of those trials that happen. Same thing if you're looking for a doctor with half a dozen experiences treating a patient with aggressive cancer. But how hard is it to find a young software engineer with half a dozen big websites under his belt?
Now, I don't think either perception is completely true, in the sense that I think people underestimate how much judgment software engineers exercise and overestimate how quickly they can build up valuable experience.
1) Doctors and lawyers are seen as exercising judgment, while engineers are seen as building things.
2) Training opportunities (in the "learn by doing" sense of "training") for doctors and lawyers are much harder to come by than for engineers. If you're looking for a lawyer who has taken half a dozen big commercial litigations through trial, you're probably looking for someone very old because there just aren't very many of those trials that happen. Same thing if you're looking for a doctor with half a dozen experiences treating a patient with aggressive cancer. But how hard is it to find a young software engineer with half a dozen big websites under his belt?
Now, I don't think either perception is completely true, in the sense that I think people underestimate how much judgment software engineers exercise and overestimate how quickly they can build up valuable experience.