An amusing anecdote from a HN comment:

When I joined Sun in ‘86 I thought it was the pinnacle of technological excellence to be a kernel programmer, and I joined the Systems Group, the notional center of the Sun universe, in 1987. However I discovered that the primary reason you had to be picky about kernel programmers what that their bogus pointer references crashed the machine (as they occurred in kernel mode with full privileges) but discovered that network programmers could crash the whole world with their bugs. So clearly they must be in a pantheon above kernel programmers. :-)