I don’t know how old you are but this is not the case at all among my age group, recent college grads. If you say you work at Google, to continue your example, people are definitely impressed and think you’re very smart. Pretty much all of my friends and their friends are not in software engineering and that’s still the case.
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I think people are impressed by the big names, but not so much if you work for an enterprise SaaS provider.
People have heard of and will probably be at least mildly impressed by the big consumer-facing FAANGs plus maybe a few others like Microsoft, IBM, etc.. But Oracle, Salesforce, SAP (to say nothing of a myriad of other software and hardware companies)? The average person hasn't even heard of most of them.
And if they have heard of them it’ll be like “oh, [software], that thing the data entry guy uses? Cool, I guess...” I mean, how impressed would you be meeting a guy who works at a big office supply company? Most software, to the users, is equivalent to other basic office tools like pens and staplers (except more frustrating to use). It doesn’t exactly have that wow factor.
Hah that's if you're lucky.
Most of the time when someone says they work at SAP or Oracle they get a "God I hate SAP" because they're using a GUI from 1990 that looks like ass and is not intuitive.
My suspicion is that people don't hate SAP because of bad looking GUI, but because it implements rigid, hard-to-discover business processes that make everyone miserable (but make the company as a whole efficient).
Have you seen the SAP GUI?
But you are also right as well - and you'd be surprised at how inefficient it really can be.
That is my first reaction...
If you make comparisons to Google people will have no way of telling the difference.
I guess they might think 'that sounds like a good office job they just be smart and they must appreciate those free massages'. But they aren't going to second you to join the Pacific-Union are they?