It sounds to me like you've never actually worked in software engineering. I'd estimate only 30-45% of my time in actually spent 'programming'. The rest of it i

It sounds to me like you've never actually worked in software engineering. I'd estimate only 30-45% of my time in actually spent 'programming'. The rest of it is spent (re)designing systems, learning new technologies and techniques, creating infrastructure (monitoring, boxes, AWS structures etc), testing (though this is often programming but of a reasonably different kind) and writing documentation (even if it's not as in-depth as other engineering fields. I've actually been really enjoying work recently because I've spent the last 2 weeks mainly just programming and its been a lovely change. I'm not unsympathetic to the authors views on the lack of certification, and due to fast feedback loops software engineering is very different to traditional engineering fields but there's a lot more to software engineering than programming.