This reminds me of the attitude of a former employer. It was a small tech company, the CEO/owner was an old school business type. Always well groomed, nice suits, the car, etc.

He often had visitors come in to the office to see him, and he'd give a short tour on the way to his office. He'd stop by the sales area and introduce whoever was around and then he'd bring the visitor to the entry of the open office style room that had 4 of us software developers and say something like "And this is the bigger room, with a couple programmers" in such a way that it was as if he was showing off exotic pets or automated machinery. As if we were literally sitting there punching in the correct sequence of buttons in order to program a VCR.

"Programmers" are low status, and now when we are at the White House it'll be easier to tell who we are.