[throwaway2016a]

People in our own field tend to assume that because there are "software engineers" who are clearly not doing engineering must mean that no software engineers are engineers.

I think a lot of "software engineers" fall under what in another industry would be called a "technician" which muddies the discussion.

Although I'm not sure I'd even put the bar as high as medical, financial, and military.

A sufficiently large web application can indeed require a level of discipline often associated with engineering. The amount of process and control when you have 50 people working on a project and millions of users is very different than the lone hacker in their garage.

You also implied that in engineering making a tiny change can be a year worth of paperwork. While not as extreme as that, if your handling credit card data for instance there is a lot of paperwork, documentation, and verification that goes into pushing a change live.

[tjr]

Something else interesting is that the notion of engineered aerospace software does not necessarily have anything to do with the software itself. A lone hacker in their garage very well could author the exact same software. The difference is in how it was developed, and that there exists a paper trail to demonstrate it was developed and reviewed to sufficient standards. Requirements and tests and reviews don't get installed on the aircraft; the executable object code gets installed on the aircraft.

One might posit that "software engineering" is not very much about developing the actual software at all, but just ensuring that it is done correctly?

[throwaway2016a]

If you read the PE exam for Software Engineering. It is very much that. A lot of process management.