[colordrops]

Ok, let's take another angle on this. The fundamental difference between software and most other engineering domains is that software doesn't involve physical matter (at least directly). The standards and design patterns in civil engineering, mechanical engineering, etc are driven by physical constraints. Whether it be monetary cost for constituent parts, or time cost for delivery, or just the limits of physics in general. Many of these limits are non-existent in software. There is no physical weight to a software object. A poor 10 year can make a million copies of it as easily as a rich software company.

Now there is software that tightly follows specs and standards, and you typically find it in critical systems, such as medical and aerospace. But there are orders of magnitude more software projects than non software engineering projects because they require so little to instantiate. There is almost no barrier to entry with software, and no BOM, and no supply chain.

Perhaps it would help to only call a subset of software projects as "engineering" - that would solve the problem. Not all software needs to be engineered. I don't need to engineer a script that downloads some videos for me or my personal website. And that's not a bad thing.