Moreover, there seems to be a contradiction there: they are saying engineering is not inherently domain-specific, but to seek out domain experts when the need a

Moreover, there seems to be a contradiction there: they are saying engineering is not inherently domain-specific, but to seek out domain experts when the need arises. Okay? That network engineer isn't REALLY an engineer until he wants to learn about databases? Would a "network engineer" be a non-sequitur in itself? "Software engineering," as the term is usually used, is really a joke. In my mind, engineering is about rigor: process, measurability and discipline. The hallmark of a well-engineered system, in my opinion, is reliability. Software is anything but reliable. Too much of software development is throwing things at the wall and hoping that sticks, because there is not a good understanding (or willful neglect) of how the different parts of the stack may adversely affect your application. Add that to ever-expanding requirements scope, poorly designed/maintained/understood code artifacts, and developer churn, and the typical software project is rather frail. There are considerations you can make for more reliable software: a testing regimen and release planning, conservative resource estimates and knowing your bottlenecks, strategies for degraded operating conditions, fallback and error mitigation, scaling, consistent documentation, and basically knowing the seams of your software, where things might break, under what conditions, and what corrective action could be done. Most software projects either move too quickly or are simply not important enough to hit these points. There are exceptions, of course (most well-known software we use would qualify), but those are not the rule: most YC companies certainly would not qualify as doing "software engineering." In fact, that almost seems to be the antithesis of a fast-moving startup. Imagine your civil engineer did not take shear, vibration, bedrock, joint and material strength, etc into account when designing a structure, or allowed a good design to be constructed with shoddy labor, duct-taped together. That is exactly what we see from most software "engineering" today. Move fast and break things, indeed.