I respectfully disagree with your point of view. There are certain things that are very ... softwar-y, and only engineers who know how to handle software well

I respectfully disagree with your point of view. There are certain things that are very ... softwar-y, and only engineers who know how to handle software well can come up with. Google's Percolator, the plethora of Apache data crunshing stacks, whole paradigm shifts like Object Storage, virtualization, and so on. Some of these are the equivalent of Burj Khalifa. Not anyone, or any team for that matter, can build them correctly. Which is why I think the term Software Engineer and the concept of software engineering is very justifiable. Yes, I think it is a form of engineering, in the sense that it a tangible discipline that produces artifacts that are useful to humans and that require very specific scientific knowledge and a minimum of academic background. Just my two cents on the matter.