Very true. When I'm at social occasions and I get asked what I do for a living, the subject will be hurriedly dropped when I reply that I'm a software developer. It amuses me. As you say, the whole concept seems to be so far outside of most people's frame of reference, that they have literally nothing to say on the subject.
The lack of intellectual curiosity in the general populace is dismaying to me, but it was ever thus.
> the whole concept seems to be so far outside of most people's frame of reference
What? Are you living in the same world as me?
Pretty much every industry apart from manual labour or craftsmanship related work uses software. If you work in an office chances you spend most of your time using software.
Then people go home and play on their smartphones which connect to back-end API servers developed by software engineers or stream films of netflix, also developed by software engineers.
You completely missed my point. I wasn't suggesting that the average person doesn't utilise software on a day to day basis. I was agreeing with the author of the post above mine, who pointed out that to most people, "any kind of computing device is a black box built on magic". They have absolutely no idea how their devices work, and neither do they care to find out.
The lack of intellectual curiosity in the general populace is dismaying to me, but it was ever thus.