The same way being a mechanical engineer relates to political leaning, I'd assume.

I don't think it does. It also doesn't mean they are not intelligent. It just means they spent a long time studying their trade, which is commendable.

But if you want to understand politics, you need to do like the rest of us and study politics. You can't look at a bucket and then say you understand the river.

One only look into politics if they need to.

When you have a comfortable life there's no objective reason to question the structure of power are oneself is immersed into.

Because programmers generally get a comfortable lifestyle from the compensation for their work, they can easily believe that wages generally correlates to skill and effort, becoming completely oblivious to the concept of surplus value. From that point on they are susceptible to reinforcing dominant ideology.

Speaking as a programmer trying to rally the class. It's hard! Too much anecdotal evidence that things are fine, apparently. But I want to believe tides are starting to change.

Maybe somewhat, but mostly as class interests. I know a horrible neoliberal programmer who thinks he’s smarter than everyone because he reads Wikipedia articles. I figured out that the beliefs seemed highly correlated with his position as a labor aristocrat.