[jclulow]

I think in many respects these problems are actually _under_-engineering. It's possible to treat software as an artefact with a measurable level of quality, and to use frankly not especially ambitious tools (programming languages with memory safety and rich type systems, unit and integration tests, etc) to build them. It's also possible to have a strong sense of user experience and taste as far as what makes a product, not just a pile of parts.

But you have to take software seriously as something that can improve a system, not just a cost centre to be minimised where possible, and an embarrassing source of problems that will ultimately end up in the newspaper or worse.