It seems like it's more like the part of software engineering that's "Figure out how to get a pull request accepted" or "Run git log and determine why this chan

It seems like it's more like the part of software engineering that's "Figure out how to get a pull request accepted" or "Run git log and determine why this change was made" or "Present your work convincingly at a conference" than the part of software engineering that's "Fix warnings and pass tests." You're still working with systems, in a broad sense: you're working with systems of people with fairly discoverable incentives and desires. But they're very different from systems that run on your computer.