> the core skills and personality traits required to be properly good at the job are very much feminine. Precision, diligence, carefully working through a dull task and making sure that things are going to work in all cases... this is still the same set of values of care and diligence that led to people hiring women for the initial software jobs in the first place.

Mmm yay, more gender essentialism explicitly agreeing with 1950s gender stereotypes from this author.

I think there's an additional, more fundamental reason.

The thing about software, unlike many other kinds of engineering, is that it often feels disconnected from hardware and actual, you know, physics. Of course there are physical limits to software (speed of light, the size of a CPU, ...), but they are usually abstracted away or they are managed in some other ways (like scaling).

Also, consider that the fundamental tools of software engineering, programming languages, are built to be able to support essentially everything you can think of and define precisely (functional Turing completeness).

Finally, there has been a lot of push towards the idea that to be a good SWE you need to code as a hobby, too, "dream code", and essentially live your own life thinking about technology.

When you are a successful tech person (you're good at what you're doing), and the approach to your job (define things accurately enough and you can do essentially everything, abstract way the "real" stuff, ...) becomes the approach to your hobbies and your entire life, and your social circles are exclusively made of tech people, the temptation to treat everything as a SWE challenge can drive you to the extremes.

Tech (especially software wise) is something you can drive to your own goals with little obstacles, so why not treat old age as a "bug" to be removed? Why waste "life cycles" to prepare and taste actual food, when you get nutrients in a more time-efficient way? And so on.

The less extreme step to this is working in tech domains which are "cool" regardless of the actual impacts on people's lives and society. This is of course not specific to SWE, but I feel like SWE somehow amplifies this because of the immaterial nature of code.