[falcolas]

Our field may be grounded by solid engineering and conceptual foundations, but we have much more in common with the medieval blacksmith than we do a modern machinist.

For example: Given a bog-standard relational database and the requirement to be able to create, read, update, and delete rows in the database, what is the best way to present that via an HTTP API? What language will be used? What will the API look like? What edge cases will be considered? How long will it take?

You'll probably get a unique answer for every dev you ask, even though they'll all consider it to be a trivial task. You'll probably also get fairly unique clarification questions about the spec from each one as well.

I'm not sure, when we can put the same task to 100 people and get 100 unique results (and few (if any) would agree to monetary penalties for failures), that we're strongly positioned within the engineering discipline.